Anonymous leapt to the support of WikiLeaks after various companies terminated business links with the site. The 1,000-strong group of activists launched what they called Operation Payback, vowing to give perceived anti-WikiLeaks firms a “black eye”.

And Amazon’s reputation, it seems, has taken a particularly bad hammering as a result.

Social-media analytics firm Alterian has researched the online conversations around the companies involved in the Anonymous hacking (WikiLeaks, PayPal, Amazon, Visa and MasterCard). It found that:

• There have been more than 200,000 social-media mentions of the companies involved in the incident.
• Amazon has had the greatest share of voice with 90,000 mentions, followed by PayPal with 75,000.
• Amazon also received the most negative comments with 30.25 per cent, again followed by 26.31 per cent for PayPal.

The company’s going to have to do some major damage-control to repair its reputation (that means no late deliveries over Christmas, then).

Alterian’s social monitoring tools are impressive. Over the eight weeks before the X Factor final, the company looked at the volume of online chatter about the contestants, as well as the sentiment of the conversations. The day before the final X Factor show, the company emailed us predicting that Matt Cardle would win. Nice work.

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