Social media has made its way into a lot of things, including the Super Bowl experience.  It is even more obvious this year that the Super bowl event is barely connected with the football game itself anymore, but with revenues from advertising. Various brands entered the social media whiz with the 2011 Super Bowl, among which Mercedez-Benz and Audi unveiled separate plans to launch high-profile social-media contests that offer hefty prizes to consumers who best use unconventional social-media tactics to tweet and digitally tout the foreign brands before the Super Bowl. Mercedez-Benz, for example, launched “The World’s First Twitter-Fueled Race,” which awards two new cars to the two-person team of social-media wizards that garners for Mercedes-Benz the most tweets, Facebook “likes” and social-media currency by game day.

Social media not only relates to current trends, but it is also an inexpensive means of advertising. Unlike TV ads that can suck up to $3 million for a 30-second TV ad, social media also engages with consumers. Brands have come to understand that one-way communication means, such as TV, radio or print ads are behind the times and two-way communications have found their way. By engaging with customers, brand awareness increases.

According to Mashable, online discussions about Super bowl commercials increased 9% in the 12-hour period following the game’s start, compared to last year.  Also, a closer analysis carried out by Nielsen shows that the day after last year’s game, one-third of the Super Bowl-related Web banter was about the ads, not the game. Some of the most popular searches refer to Chrysler, Pepsi Max Audi and Android over the course of the day.

Groupon invested over $3 million to produce three spots.  Sony, on the other hand, kept its Xperia Play under wraps, only to reveal the new Android gaming device at the Super Bowl event. Motorola as well preserved the best for the last and advertised the Xoom tablet running on Android 3.0 Honeycomb.  The tablet will be available starting with the 24^th of February and is expected to be the forerunner of the Android’s booming success with tablets.