The top 10 automakers are all working hard to garner market share in a tough times. So it seams appropriate to take a look at how they are doing in the social media space. To start lets see how their market share stacks up against social media mindshare. To compile this comparison I've started by using the broad based social bookmarking activity of the first 6 months of 2008 from digg.com and reddit.com.
Here is the comparison of
US Market Share of Auto Manufacturer with the amount of attention or mindshare that creators, critics and collector gave the brands within the Social Bookmarking world. (Click the bar chart to enlarge.)

What's obvious, and we have all been reading about it, is the US automaker are loosing ground to lower cost more fuel efficient overseas automakers like Toyota, Honda and Nissan. While I need to look at more data to see if the same trend is true for social bookmarking behavior, on the surface there doesn't appear to be a correlation.
Interestingly 2 groups have emerged from the comparison. The first group, GM, Ford, BMW and Mercedes, all received much more attention from the social bookmarking community than their market share. Perhaps these companies are actively making noise online that is encouraging the community with, well dig in later.
The second group, Toyota, Chrysler, Honda, Nissan and Hyundai, did not receive a level of attention from the social bookmarking community that reflects their market share.
Volkswagen is right in the middle, with a market share and level of attention that match.
Lets take a closer look at the 1st group that have received more social buzz than their market share. Of the stories about GM, Ford, BMW and Mercedes, 84% received no attention, no comments and almost no votes. 14.5% of the stories received some attention and accounted for 30% of the online conversation. Finally the remaining 1.5% of the stories received most of the attention and accounted for 70% of the conversation.
The number are even more skewed for the 2nd group. 88% of the stories about Toyota, Chrysler, Honda, Nissan and Hyundai received no attention. While 11% of the stories received 30% of the attention, and the remaining 1% of storied received the remaining 70% of attention.
More on the mindshare statisticsThe mindshare statistic is focused on people that are engaged enough to participate in the online conversation by blogging, commenting, sharing, voting, rating and reviewing automakers online. I did not look at spectators, those people that are simply reading the posts and comments. While spectators are an important group of automaker customers, I'm more interested in the influencers. And influencers are typically those creators and critics that are doing all the blogging commenting, rating, etc. In my next post I'll break the mindshare statistics down in more detail.
People + activitiesForrester research has come up with the nice groups I've been using here to refer to the different types of people + activity. Here is a summary:
- Creators create the social content. They blog, publish web pages, create videos & poscasts. Most importantly they make them available online.
- Critics respond to comment. They comment on blogs, rate and review things and participate in forums.
- Collectors organize the web's content. They tag and categorize things, vote on importance of content and use RSS feed.
- Spectators consume the social content. The read the blog posts, ratings, reviews and other content that has been created and organized by the Creators, Critics and Collector.
I've left out a few, so check out the
Forrester Social Technographics Ladder for more info.