The Super Bowl is almost here, and even though Boston still isn’t talking about the Pats loss, we are sure to be tuning in at the very least for the ads.

For the last two Super Bowls Mullen (recently named the #3 agency on Ad Age’s annual A-List) has put on BrandBowl during the game to “turn the Super Bowl into a social media party.” The real concept is to measure and rank top ads based on what viewers are tweeting. Radian6, a leading social media monitoring software company with an office right here in Boston, is providing the technology to make this happen.

During the game Radian6 will provide a live stream of tweets hashtagged #brandbowl around what viewers think about each ad, and which will live on Boston.com. But the real fun comes in the rankings after the game. Radian6 will calculate the total number of tweets about each brand as well as the sentiment of the tweet – positive, negative or neutral – to calculate a “net sentiment score.” Tweets just need to mention the brand advertising to be included in the analysis.

Last year Doritos, Google, Focus on the Family, Snickers, and Budweiser took the top five spots. To wet your whistle, here are the brands on showcase during this year’s Super Bowl:

Mullen’s Chief Innovation Officer Edward Boches told BostInno that BrandBowl “epitomizes” the new media landscape. “We watch Super Bowl ads on TV and we talk about them on Twitter. While the game itself may get more viewers than BrandBowl gets participants, the numbers from last year alone prove that this convergence of media is growing.”

Over 10,000 people participated in last year’s BrandBowl, with well over 100,000 tweets analyzed. Boches anticipates this year to be even bigger. “With improved analytics, a better list of keywords, and the added visibility of Boston.com’s participation, we expect those numbers to be much greater.”

This year marks the first year that Boston.com will be participating in BrandBowl, and points to a growing mainstream use of Twitter. “This is an incredibly fun feature that we think Boston.com readers, and anyone who loves Super Bowl commercials, is just going to want to monitor constantly,” said editor Ron Agrella. “This is really digital Democracy in action – the Twittosphere is going to provide almost real-time public reaction as to whether these expensive commercials resonate and are successful, or simply flop.”

Check out a video of how BrandBowl works below for more information, and be sure to tweet and tune in to http://brandbowl2011.com/ on game day!