Executive Summary:

People ARE talking about your Brand on Social Media. This much you know. Should you be tracking the conversations and interactions? Can actionable insights be delivered to you by monitoring Social Media for your brand (and that of your competitors)? In order to answer these, and other questions, about tracking the activity of your brand on this new media, we conducted a monitoring exercise for Hybrid/Electric cars. What follows is a detailed report of the same.

Contents:

• The Idea
• The Methodology
• Our Findings
  • Relevant/Irrelevant Ratio
  • Competitor Comparison related insights
  • Ratio of Tone, within brand
  • Product Related, by Tone
  • Price Related, by Tone
  • Buying Stage/Lead Generation
• Conclusions drawn/Learning
• Notes/Appendices

The Idea:

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We have previously performed Social Media Monitoring exercises on the Indian Elections 2009 as well as on the Online Travel Sector in India. We now shifted our focus to the worldwide Hybrid Car market. Our aim was to see if it is possible to get insights about a market, by monitoring the Social Media buzz around the same.

The Methodology:

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1. We used the industry leading Social Media Monitoring tool SM2 by the people over at Techrigy for the first stage of the process, viz. Capturing the data from across Social Media.

2. Since the study was to be about Hybrid/Electric Cars (as against elections), we decided to query the vast space using some well known brand names in the Hybrid/Electric cars market.
3. We used the SM2 to retrieve results over a 4 day period (12^th June ‘09 to 15^th June 09). This period gave us a total of 2822 results. SM2 did a great job of first level Categorization of the results.
4. Then, our team of Social Media Analysts swung into action. Using SM2, we first created a set of categories, which we believed would deliver insights into the monitoring effort.
5. We then analyzed each result, individually, categorizing it as appropriate. Humans, understanding Humans, as we like to say. We then sliced and diced the results, to get some interesting insights.
6. What did we find? Over to the next section.

Our Findings:

Relevant/Irrelevant ratio: (Back To Top)

Even with a very specific query, a large number of results, which had no bearing on the subject were recovered. During the human cleanup phase, these were categorized as irrelevant (What was classified as irrelevant?). These irrelevant results, are not considered while drawing further insights.

Of the total volume of 2822 results, the number of irrelevant results is 1837, the remaining being relevant. In terms of percentage, 65% were irrelevant, whereas 35%, relevant.

Types on insights available:

Competitor Comparison Related: (Back To Top)

If two or more brands of Hybrid/Electric cars have been compared, we marked the result as ‘Competitor Comparison Related’, while also tagging the result according to the tone it uses for each of the companies being compared. 37 relevant results were marked as ‘Competitor Comparison Related’.

Example: Is the Prius too mighty to take down?: (this was marked as being Neutral for both Honda and Toyota, as well as Price Related).

Summary: Among the results tagged as ‘Competitor Comparison’, the recurring comparison was the one between the Toyota Prius (entering its 3rd generation) and the first generation Honda Insight. While the sales of the Insight are said to below expectations and the Prius sales have also fallen, among the two, the 3rd generation Prius emerges ahead of the Insight. Examples: (1, 2).

Ratio of tone, within brand: (Back To Top) 

A brand has some chatter about it. But within this chatter, how much is positive/negative/neutral? How does the percentage of positive/negative/neutral results for a brand stack up against the same percentage for another brand?

Tone For GM: 78% Neutral Mentions, 13% Positive Mentions, 8%Negative Mentions

Summary: The Negative results for GM followed the announcement that GM canceled most of its Hybrid lineup, including the Malibu Hybrid 2010. Largely, the positive results were those which spoke the upcoming Buick having a Hybrid Powertrain.

Tone For Toyota: 78% Neutral Mentions, 19% Positive Mentions, 2%Negative Mentions

Summary: Negative results for Toyota came in the form of Tesla motors CEO saying that the Prius is not a true hybrid. Other negative results were about the Prius not being able to cross the 50 MPG average of fuel efficiency. Positive results for Toyota came from talk around the Prius, which people seem to be happy about, as well as reviews of the Toyota Civic hybrid.

Tone For Ford: 72% Neutral Mentions, 26% Positive Mentions, <1%Negative Mentions

Summary: The one negative result about Ford concerns how Toyota is beating Ford and GM, by employing lean business practices, allowing them to come up with innovate faster and cheaper as in the     case of the Prius. The largest number of positive results for Ford were around Senator McCain planning to buy a Ford Fusion Hybrid.

Product Related, by tone: (Back To Top)

When someone is talking about the features of your product (in this case, a Hybrid car), what tone does she use?

Take Toyota, for example. If a brand manager at Toyota wanted to find out, if someone has spoken on Social Media about the brand using a negative tone, this can be done. We can see all results with a negative tone, about its product (viz. The car itself, as against price, availability etc.). The following result matches the criteria:

Why is the Toyota Prius such a bore:

This result is ideal for posting a response to, and could have been escalated to the relevant department.

Summary: By far, the largest number of results for all brands are Product related. The Product related category is where correct Categorization can yield great results, as seen in the above example. The topics being discussed are by and large:

• People discussing news and events related to the brands (1, 2)
• Features of existing Products (1, 2)
• Upcoming releases (1, 2)

Price Related, by tone: (Back To Top)

39 results have been Categorized as ‘Price related’. Example: Honda Insight a Flop?

(This has been categorized into Honda: Tone Negative, Price Related)

Summary: Most price related results were about the Toyota Prius and the Honda Insight. The Honda Insight is priced at $2000 less than the Prius, and in response, Toyota has slashed the price of its car by $1000. Despite the lower cost, the Honda Insight is likely to miss its sales target.

Buying Stage/Lead Generation: (Back To Top)

As we saw in the case of travel websites, listening to Social Media can be used as a method of lead generation as well.

An example of a result Categorized as ‘Buying: Early Stage’:

Summary: In the Buying Stage: Early category, people spoke about cars which they were considering as possible purchases. In the Buying Stage: Late category, most of the noise was around Senator McCain’s decision to buy a Ford Fusion.

Conclusions Drawn/Learning:

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About the Hybrid Cars Market, and related chatter on Social Media:

1. In terms of Social Media Volume the largest brands are Toyota, GM, Ford and Honda
2. The most discussed cars are Prius, Insight, Fusion and Civic
3. Smaller brands are also being spoken about on Social Media, with much lower volume.
4. The most discussed topics surrounding these brands and cars are the products themselves (features etc.), upcoming releases, price related issues, comparisons and news related to the brands/cars. There was also discussion related to the fact that despite the 24 hour production schedule of Toyota, there still exists a waiting period for the Prius.

About the Social Media Monitoring Exercise:

1. For any Brand/Company interested in knowing about the Social Media chatter surrounding them, this kind of a Social Media Monitoring exercise can deliver great value as well as actionable insights.

2. Such an exercise entails

• A Social Media monitoring tool, which can extract relevant data from across Social Media properties, based on the query that is set up.
• Setting up a Query, in such a manner that all possible relevant results are captured, while at the same time minimizing the incidence of irrelevant results being caught.
• Setting up of appropriate categories which will allow for better analysis of the data gathered. Both the above (query and category set up) are iterative in nature, with ongoing tweaking required.
• Beyond this, a layer of human intervention is absolutely necessary. The results retrieved by the tool need to be cleaned, by humans.
• To these cleaned results, appropriate rigorous categorization of the results must be done.These Categorized-by-Humans results can then be sliced and diced to derive actionable insights.

Your questions/comments are invited, of course.

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Notes and Appendices:

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NOTE: The above report is an analysis of the Social Media buzz around the subject of Hybrid Vehicles. None of the above statements represent any personal views of ours, on the subject.

NOTE: The numbers mentioned above, say for GM, are only of those results in which the brand name ‘GM’ (or ‘General Motors’ and its variations thereof) was mentioned. The same is the case with the other results as well.

What was classified as irrelevant? (Back To Top)

Two kinds of results were classified as irrelevant:

1. Results which were not related to Hybrid/Electric Cars: Many results talk about the different brands mentioned in the query and use the words ‘Hybrid’ and ‘Electric’ in a context other than the one relevant to the search. Example.

2. Results related to Hybrid/Electric Cars, which are irrelevant to people interested in monitoring the brand: Some results like link farms (blogs with only links pointing to other pages), many wiki talk pages (where the brand/product reference is not edited). Example.

[Edits: Tweaked the Title and the above notes]

[Edits 2: Changed graph style, formatting, added menu]

If you wish to download the White Paper for this study (PDF), you can visit the Resources Page on our website.