Now that the Olympic Games are headed toward a close, the race for marketing opportunities is on. Let’s try to test your marketing IQ. Who do you think was the most talked about athlete of the games? Lindsey Vonn? After all, she did the Sports Illustrated thing and won a gold. Apolo Ohno? He won, and he’s cute. Bode Miller, the rebel? Shaun White, the dude that knows everything about kids?

If you picked one of these you would be wrong on all counts. Sidney Crosby, NHL star and American hockey was the winner in the Olympic popularity derby by a long shot, if you listen to social media commentary. Networked Insights, using its SocialSense listening platform, found that Crosby scored an engagement/buzz level that buried White by an index of 1610 to 769. The platform mines 300 million people, 10 million different destinations on the Web, 80 million posts and comments a month.

The Networked Insights data brings up an interesting issue behind the Sidney Crosby social media phenomenon. Many platform providers in this space believe that companies are not listening to what’s happening there, and are therefore surprised by customer preferences and feedback. Marketers need to focus less on advertising on Facebook, they say, and listen more to what’s happening on Facebook.

“It concerns me that brands still treat social media like it’s Web 1.0,” says Dan Neely, founder and CEO of Networked Insights. “They think in terms of how they’re going to own it. They don’t invite people, they don’t engage in dialogue. But there’s massive learning to be had there. There’s a whole business ecosystem to be accessed, and it’s one in which you must learn fast and deliver fast.”

Neely says brands can stop wading through “muddy water” and use technology to listen to social media activity and in the process change the way they market based on that customer intelligence.

Holly Pavlika, executive creative director at Big Fuel Communications agrees, and takes the concept a step further. “It’s more than listening,” she says, “it’s about acting. The emotions that you can learn from social media are direct reflections of how customers understand your brand. But when you find that out, the company needs to act.”

Jeff Einstein, co-founder of Chicago-based Einstein Brothers, is of the opinion that listening is more important than advertising on social media at this time. Advertising will be another step in the social media journey, and another move toward targeting rather than reaching customers online, he says.

“Social networks represent the continued trend of people using the Internet to travel toward me, myself, and I,” he says. “At this point, when they reach that destination, they don’t want to be interrupted. But they might have a lot to say in their conversation.”