Toyota, GM, Honda capture the lion’s share of positive bloggage

Based on analysis of 40 million blog posts collected during the past six months, Toyota, General Motors and Honda are the topics of a large amount of spontaneous consumer online discussions regarding environmental sustainability -- and have a higher-than-average number of positive mentions, according to the J.D. Power and Associates 2008 Environmental Sustainability Report.

J.D. Power and Associates Web Intelligence Division, which specializes in blog research and consumer generated media for market insight, has released its first comprehensive look at consumer conversations about environmental sustainability, global warming, purchase trends and user demographics, which are captured from online blogosphere conversations. The report is designed to provide automotive industry executives with ongoing measures of the extent of consumer engagement around the topic of sustainability, and how that engagement is influencing the buying habits and preferences of their customers and other consumers within their targeted demographics.

The inaugural report details discussions about the sustainability topic in general and also classifies brands based on both volume (measured by the number of new mentions per week, on average) and percentage of positive mentions. Brands that are discussed are then categorized into one of four quadrants: pacesetters (having higher-than-average volume and higher-than-average positive sentiment); contenders (lower-than-average volume but higher positive sentiment); emerging (higher-than-average volume but lower positive sentiment); or challenged (lower-than-average volume and low positive sentiment). Those brands that receive less than 1% of the total number of automotive online social media mentions are designated as dormant in online discussions of sustainability.

General Motors, Honda and Toyota emerge as pacesetters and score in the top quadrant for both volume and the percentage of positive mentions. Toyota leads General Motors in the total volume of posts, accounting for 14% of all posts regarding automotive brands and sustainability. General Motors is a close second in post volume, representing 11% of all posts. However, General Motors received a higher percentage of positive mentions between January and June 2008 -- 49%, compared with 46% for Toyota. In contrast, Honda's rate of positive mentions is 53%, but the brand receives a lower volume of mentions than the other two brands in the pacesetter quadrant -- 7%, which is half as much as Toyota.

Nissan outscores all other automotive brands in the percentage of positive discussion with 56%, but receives a lower overall volume than the brands in the pacesetter group, just 2%, which places the brand in the contender quadrant. Ford also accounts for considerable volume of discussion (8%) but has fewer positive mentions than many other brands, with less than half of all comments being positive in nature (43%).

The report findings also include:

-- Overall, the majority of conversations surrounding automotive brands and environmental sustainability were either positive or neutral in sentiment-very few were negative.

-- More than 320,000 spontaneous conversations about environmental sustainability, global warming, conscious consumerism and related topics were found among English-language posts in the public blogosphere between March and August 2008.

-- The overall volume of online discussion regarding sustainability issues has increased considerably during the past 18 months. Discussion volumes increased by 160% during 2007, and another 250% during the first six months of 2008. Have an opinion on this article? Post your comment below.

Tweet