Posts Tagged ‘social media news’

Measuring sentiment and social media coverage is a fantastic way to figure out who is saying what about your product, and where they are saying it. But what if you don’t know where to start?

This is where tools like the Biz360 Topic Discovery (part of Biz360 Community platform) can prove extremely useful. For example, if you had heard of a massive Toyota recall and wanted to wrap your head around it from the perspective of social media conversations, you could use it to uncover prominent topics that occur alongside key phrases like: “Toyota recall” and “Prius recall.” You end up with a clickable tag cloud, with the ability to drill into each tag. If we look into the Toyota Recall tag cloud (based on keywords “Toyota” and “recall”), this is what we get:

Clearly Toyota is in quite a bit of trouble, with Congress probing it, and this being an “unprecedented recall”, with 5.3 million affected cars to be exact. Furthermore, there is something about pedals and sticky accelerators. You can also figure out that Camry is affected, and recall has been expanded. Not surprisingly, this recall has affected sales in what seems to be a major way. (Note: this is only a part of the tag cloud).

Drilling down into the Prius Recall (see below), we discover that there’s something about an Apple Co-founder that has to do with the recall. A drill-down into that tag reveals the following article from CNET, which tells us how Steve Wozniak described Prius’s problems as not mechanical, but software based. Moreover, the tag cloud tells us that Prius recall has to do with brakes and hybrid battery, complaints about which are literally “pouring in”. Also, Prius recall seems to be affecting the U.S. as well as Japan, which has forced it to investigate.

As if Toyota wasn’t having enough fun with all of this, the accelerator pedal recall spreads from the U.S. to Europe, and there’s a class-action lawsuit brewing. However, seems that there is a fix coming, and a plan has been announced. This shouldn’t be a surprise, but clearly Toyota’s reputation is “battered”.

It is no surprise that sentiment around both, pedal and floor mat recalls, is more negative than positive these days.

If you wanted to place the fiasco on a time continuum, you could look at the trendline to understand when the news hit. Seems like most of the action happened on February 3-4, and 9th.

And finally, if you want to know which of the recall issues is creating more buzz in social media, you can use a handy share of voice analysis to compare the topics against each other. Clearly, the Toyota Prius recall is dominating the news.

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The past several months have been an incredible demonstration of the power of social media. Not long ago most people viewed social media as a fun way to reconnect with old classmates or maybe find those other unique individuals who share your obscure interests. Not many people would have claimed that social media could change the face of major issues like human rights.

Remember that social media is really just the electronic voice of the populate. It represents the intersection of technology and growing interest in peer to peer conversations. 

Recently there have been several events that have thrusted social media into the heart of issues of humanity. While there are a growing number of such examples, there are a couple that were game changers in my mind:

On June 2nd just prior to the anniversary of the uprising in Tiananmen Square, The Chinese Government blocked access to Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and more sites. Their attempt to quiet the public discussion of the anniversary kicked off weeks worth of public condemnation of Chinese censorship by citizens from around the globe. During the week of June 2nd, the number of negative social media posts about the Chinese Government increased by more than 1900% from the prior week according to our Biz360 analysis. In May, less than 3% of social media posts about China mentioned censorship. However, during the first two weeks of June, the #1 conversation about China was their attempts to block the internet and social media sites. It represented approximately 58% of all social media conversation about China. While the event was covered for a couple of days on television, millions of people continued to talk about it for weeks via social media. While traditional media was on to other stories, this issue remains at the front of peer to peer conversations around the world.

The Iranian Presidential Elections were unique to that nation’s history. Social Media helped ignite interest from a new generation of passionate voters who were looking for reform. The result was record turn out at the polls. The controversy that followed was not necessarily unique in history, but the reaction was. Hundreds of thousands of Iranian citizens used blogs, message boards, web video, social networking sites and micro-blogs such as Twitter to voice their opposition to the election results. They used social media to organize some of the largest protests in the history of Iran. What amazed me the most was that social media appeared to give the protestors sustained energy that remains active today.  Historically, governments like Iran with largely state controlled media have been able to quickly quell voices of opposition. However, social media communication has given the voices of reform in Iran an outlet to continue the debate and their campaign outside of traditional means.  The conversation regarding the Iranian Elections remains very active still today. According to our Biz360 analysis, this past Sunday, the number of social media posts/tweets about the Iranian Election was nearly as high as during the peak of the conversation following the June 12th election. People around the world are realizing the power of their voice. 

While social media might not actually save the world, it has the potential to change the face of big issues like human rights by giving people the power of being heard. If knowledge is power, then social media has the potential to shift the balance of power towards the populate.