Automaker Social Mind Over Matter

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 statistics
The 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 + activities
Forrester 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:

1. Creators create the social content. They blog, publish web pages, create videos & poscasts. Most importantly they make them available online.
   
2. Critics respond to comment. They comment on blogs, rate and review things and participate in forums.
   
3. Collectors organize the web's content. They tag and categorize things, vote on importance of content and use RSS feed.
   
4. 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.

Good luck on the Social Super Highway!

As this is my first post I thought I’d have a little fun with the site’s obscure name 6d:RoadSigns.  Now this is not a blog about roads signs, and it has nothing to do with 6 dimensional space-time theories.

Lets break it down.  6d comes from the idea of six degrees of separation.  As most of you already know, six degrees of separation refers to the concept that, if a person is one step away from each person he or she knows and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people he or she knows, then everyone is an average of six steps away from each person on Earth.  See wikipedia's six degrees of separation topic for the full story.

Road Signs comes from the idea that, social media is a complicated super highway connecting people all over the world.  An online world that is full of narrow and wide streets that hold many opportunities for marketers and business entrepreneurs alike to setup shop.  But as business people we are constantly looking for signs, metrics, frameworks and strategies to help point the way to potential success.  We need some road signs to point the way to success in social media.

In this blog I start building a collection of these ideas, metrics and approaches that will help marketers and entrepreneurs navigate the complex social media world.

So, why not call the blog 6d:Map?  I think we are a long way from having a concrete set of direction that could come from a map.  Right now, and I think you’d agree, we are still learning how to drive on the social media super highway, in some cases even which side of the road to drive on.  For now, I think some road signs are what we can aim for.

Okay, enough about my obscure site name.  For my next post I’ll have a little fun with Road Signs and write about the intersection of the automotive industry and social media.  In fact lets put a stake in the ground now, in the next post we will have a look at the top 10 automotive companies and see how they stack-up on a couple of the well known social bookmarking sites.