Toyota yesterday instructed 3.8 million vehicle owners to take the floor mats out of their cars, trucks and SUVs. This decision followed the deaths of four people in California in a recent crash involving a Lexus with a stuck accelerator pedal.

How did this announcement affect Toyota’s brand? We used Social Radar to research Toyota chatter.

First, we decided to pull a chart of positive, negative and conflicting Toyota chatter over September 29 and 30, just after the announcement.

Let’s also take a look at the context of Toyota’s chatter over September 29 and 30.

The data clearly shows that a large majority of this content is related to the floor mat recall. And, it’s almost entirely negative (as shown by the many topics highlighted in red). Additionally, most of the Toyota chatter was categorized by quality related mentions, which were highly negative.

We then decided to look at the positive and negative conversation trend (the green and red lines) correlating with conversation volume (the bars).

Toyota chatter was quite positive leading up to the announcement. Interestingly, Toyota chatter surged in negativity on September 30 but quickly shifted back to positive the very next day. This strong turnaround shows that people may be quickly forgiving Toyota and moving past this unforeseen mistake.