Ford, which has aggressively used social media to market to millennials, is partnering with Yahoo for a web series that’s meant to build awareness of Ford’s new electric-powered Focus.

We used Social Radar to analyze conversations online .

Ford Focus sentiment

Conversations around Ford Focus have been an average of 74% positive. Negative buzz spiked around April 9 thanks to a recall.

‘Recall’ vs. ‘electric’ mentions within Ford Focus conversations

We compared ‘recall’ vs. ‘electric’ mentions within Ford Focus conversations. Interestingly Electric is being mentioned more often.

Ford Focus Electric conversation chatter

Conversations around the Ford Focus Electric are 84% positive overall.

Will Yahoo’s reality series “Plugged In” boost chatter around the Ford Focus Electric further?

Ford unveiled its first-ever all-electric passenger car, a gas-free Ford Focus Electric, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas last Friday. The zero-CO2-emissions car can fully charge in three to four hours using an at-home, wall-mounted 240-volt charge station. Ford is planning to install up to 12,000 public charging stations throughout the country in the next 18 months. In addition, the Focus Electric will have a special version of MyFord Touch as well as MyFord Mobile, a new smartphone app that will let users keep track of their Focus Electric, change charge settings, find charging stations, and more.

Then, yesterday, Ford announced three additional hybrid electric vehicles at the Detroit Auto Show, the Ford C-MAX Hybrid, the Ford Transit Connect Electric, and the Ford C-MAX Energi as part of its plan to provide more choices for fuel efficient transportation than any other manufacturer.

We used Social Radar to run analysis around online conversations involving Ford.

Online conversations mentioning Ford

Overall chatter around Ford is not up considerably following the new electric car announcements.

Electric car trend

We compared the Ford Focus Electric, Ford C-MAX Hybrid, Ford Transit Connect, Ford C-MAX Energi with competitors Chevy Volt, Nissan Leaf and Tesla. Ford Focus Electric chatter spiked on Friday following its announcement, but Chevy Volt is currently generating the most chatter.

Ford sentiment before electric car announcement

Ford sentiment after electric car announcement

Ford’s announcements have increased positive chatter around the company. Online sentiment around Ford throughout the month prior to the announcement was 84% positive, while sentiment around Ford since the announcement has been 87% positive.

Electric car sentiment

Each of the Ford models are generating considerably higher positive conversations than their Nissan, Chevy and Tesla counterparts — although the Ford vehicles have not been driven or reviewed by consumers yet.

Electric car chatter

How does chatter around electric cars compare to hybrid? Overall chatter around Toyota’s popular hybrid Prius generated just slightly more chatter than the other models within the last 10 days.

Vehicle mentions within Ford conversations

Are the electric cars generating more chatter than some of Ford’s most popular vehicles? We analyzed chatter within Ford conversations measuring how many times each model was mentioned.

So far since the electric car announcements, the Mustang is still discussed most often in Ford conversations, mentioned in nearly 15% of Ford-related posts, followed by the Focus and F-150. The Focus Electric is generating more conversation than the Taurus, Escape, Fusion, Fiesta and others.

Will Ford’s new electric cars lead to mass adoption of a new generation of vehicles in the U.S.?

The September 2009 Social Radar Top 50 measures the brands with the most active Web presence based on overall online conversation volume. To create the Top 50 list, we used Social Radar to analyze millions of blog posts, news feeds, forums, social networks and Twitter posts to aggregate a list of the words and brands mentioned most frequently on the Web during September 2009. The list measures the number of unique individuals or sources that posted content about each brand during September 2009 rather than the overall number of mentions, which would be more heavily influenced by big fans who post frequently about a specific brand.

Twitter falls a bit, but still takes top spot. LG’s new BL20 Chocolate helped LG jump 11 spots. NFL rises again this month as the NFL season heats up. MTV jumps 13 spots due to buzz around the MTV Video Music awards. AT&T’s announcement of MMS support on the iPhone raised AT&T’s position up 5 spots.

View the full list below, or download the PDF. For additional information about how you can analyze chatter sentiment to gauge positivity/negativity, view key words mentioned about your brand and identify key influencers, visit www.infegy.com/socialradar.

Questions or comments? Twitter me @adamcoomes.

Inspired by Autoblog‘s monthly By the Numbers posts (such as this one), which detail automotive industry sales figures by brand for each month, we decided to build a list of the same brands, but looking instead at conversation volume, as we do in our Social Radar Top 50 Social Brands monthly posts. This list was built using the same methodology as our Top 50 list, but instead focusing purely on a list of 33 major automakers.

Ford has a solid lead here, which is not terribly surprising. As one of the world’s leading automakers for decades, Ford has emerged as the sole American automaker in position to survive without a government bailout. Ford has increased its emphasis on social media, with tactics like the Fiesta Movement campaign, an effort to generate buzz by giving 100 people Ford Fiestas and asking them to share their experiences online through blogs, tweets and Facebook updates leading up to its 2010 release. In addition, most of Ford’s online conversation revolves around the Ford brand, and much less in sub-brands such as Lincoln and Mercury. Brands like Chevrolet have to compete with themselves against similar sister brands such as Pontiac, and this hurts their rankings here.

Chrysler is up 5 places over last month, spurred largely by talks of its bankruptcy. We expect to see this continue throughout May, as their conversation over the last several days has surged well into first place. Also of note here is Pontiac, who moved up 10 places around talks of GM killing the brand.

Click to download the full PDF.

There are several polls going around about opinions on the hearings for government aid for the big three US automakers.  Autoblog mentioned in this post yesterday that CNN conducted a poll which said 61% of Americans oppose such aid.  They conducted their own poll, which at the time of this writing, had just over 11,000 participants, around 52% of which were in favor of aid.

I decided to run a similar poll using Social Radar’s Sentiment analysis tool to gauge support for this aid around the Web and got similar results, as depicted below:

Interestingly, the results were nearly identical with 54% in favor.  This is especially close if accounting for a few percentage points margin of error from either source.  Interesting stuff!

Looks like the country is very much split on this issue, as with many as of late.