Vitrue released its second annual ranking of the most social brands, The Vitrue 100. With the overwhelming adoption of social media among marketing professionals this list helps to establish and bring credibility to this emerging space and provide the industry with overall trends that highlight the most social brands and help demonstrate the value of social media marketing.

Vitrue is a social media management company that provides technology based solutions to help brands harness the potential of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. By combining a social relationship management platform, multi-presence capabilities and a suite of applications Vitrue is able to meet objectives such as acquisition, engagement, sales and brand awareness across the web.

This year’s list puts Apple’s iPhone on top as the world’s most social brand. Not only does the maker of Mac products maintain a large and engaging presence online, however they sell great products that people want to talk about. This positioning has afforded Apple four other spots on the list as well.

While other rankings and consulting firms such as Interbrand or Altimeter Group may offer a different listing, Vitrue’s ranking omits some well known digital brands including Facebook, YouTube and Google since they make up the social infrastructure.

Vitrue measures the buzz around products people want to talk about and the outlets on which this is done rather then the brand value based on the financial contribution it makes by increasing product demand. For example, Interbrand places Coca-Cola as the top brand in the world for 2009, while Vitrue puts them at 31 in accordance to how social they are.

“Being a social brand is not necessarily proportional to social media adoption,” said Joseph Jaffe, president of new media shop Crayon. “It’s an attitude and much more likely to be a cultural variable than having 12,000 Facebook fans.”

Jaffe notes that there can be a danger in brands placing too much emphasis on tangible metrics when it comes to brand sociability and not enough time spent on the important one’s such as expressing empathy, listening and acting human.