Mercedes Benz leads conversation in luxury cars conversation; high love for Ferrari; New Yorkers maximum tweeters, says study.
By Niharika Mookerjee
NEW YORK: According to a report released by Salorix, the smart social engagement platform, Ford dominates the buzz in the social media within the sector of the automobile industry, yielding a net positive score (NPS) of a staggering lead of 94 percent in the small and sports car segment. The launch of Ford Focus attracted a large proportion of positive feedback, with Twitter also disclosing the steady position Ford Mustang enjoyed in the sports car section.
NPS, which is the new mantra of the modern marketer to gauge brand performance, refers to the difference between the percentages of Tweets having a positive edge to those with the negative. To compile this study, Salorix, surveyed real time conversations with an analysis of 1127,767 tweets elicited from 655, 982 authors over the one month period between September and October, 2012.
This report is of particular interest to those in marketing as it plainly shows that in order to target sales, executives can no longer afford to ignore the signals from the social media. The need to be constantly revved up in the race for media dominance concerning their brand name is the newest form of doing business in the current network environment. Product launches, contests and announcements led to noticeably positive twitter while negative buzz such as Toyota product recall had an adverse effect on the brand name.
Undoubtedly, the team at Ford has successfully leveraged its media interactions and quickly adapted to the social signals through engaged conversations revolving around promotion and education of its brand cars.
The report notes that the three auto giants Ford, Honda and Toyota command the largest volume of conversations. Honda is a leading presence in the medium car segment providing a 74 percent NPS. Additionally, the launch of its Honda Accord 2013 drew a significant buzz. Among cars with sales of over 100,000, Honda possesses the highest brand love. On the other hand, Toyota witnessed a negative media surge after their October 10, 2012 announcement of a recall involving over 7 million cars. However, from the conversation sizes, the survey points out that in the small car category of Asian cars, Toyota and Honda are still the hot favorites. Chevrolet’s and Chrysler’s low NPS was struck by higher conversations of neutral sentiments.
Typically, even among upscale cars, Asian brands generate the highest buzz followed closely by European brands such as Mercedes, Lexus, BMW and Audi, with Mercedes forging ahead with a high 78 percent NPS. Among cars with sales volume of less than 100,000, it is not surprising to note that Ferrari has the highest brand love. Among sports car, Asian cars have yet to make a substantial impact while European brands continue to hold their sway. Lamborghini tips the leads in this sector with 63 percent NPS.
Interestingly, the tweets relating to auto industry were observed to be the highest on Mondays while Thursday and Friday marked the lowest levels of interest. Notably, the tweets peaked between 12 noon to 6 in the evening. Remarkably, New York City has the most number of tweeters, while among the states, Texas, California and New York engendered the maximum tweets.
Real time social information networks like Twitter and Facebook render billions of pieces of data every moment called ‘Big Data’. This information produced in the form of tweets and posts is followed very closely by bands of loyal followers cutting across wide swathes of society, state and country borders. The digital revolution saw large corporations and smaller businesses bidding to use the data to further brand consciousness and business performance.
However, the large volumes of data generated proved to be a challenge. This encouraged data processing companies to develop solutions that would capture raw data and bring meaning to its owners in the form of reader friendly reports.
Big Data Marketing Platform Provider, Salorix purports to be the first to develop a comprehensive forum to analyze and derive signals from real-time social conversations. The state of the art system created by Salorix is built on an expandable infrastructure to scale and process virtually any data volume. The Silicon-Valley based global company was founded in 2009 by techies from MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and Indian Institutes of Technology with offices in New York City and Bengaluru, India.