General Motors’ decision to cancel the entirety of its $10 million Facebook ad budget is, arguably, the second major shoe to drop on the social network’s ad budget. Back in January, Procter & Gamble scaled back its $10 billion annual ad budget to take advantage of free impressions offered by Facebook in the form of Likes and status updates. That’s two out of America’s top three biggest advertisers.

If P&G and GM both question why they should pay to be on Facebook, how long before Facebook’s other big advertisers—American Express, AT&T, Disney, Verizon—suddenly start to question their return on investment?

Will the negative news have an impact on Facebook’s IPO launch this week?

We used Social Radar to analyze conversations online.

GM mentions within Facebook conversations

GM was mentioned in 3% of all Facebook conversations online this week.

GM and Facebook conversation sentiment

Conversations mentioning GM and Facebook were 43% negative.

IPO mentions within Facebook conversations

The IPO is currently being mentioned in more than 5% of all Facebook conversations.

Facebook IPO sentiment

Facebook IPO conversations have been an average of 57% positive. Many experts are warning investors to stay away from the Facebook IPO.

Will you participate in the Facebook IPO?

Toyota agreed today to recall an additional 2.17 million U.S. vehicles due to to floor-mat problems that could interfere with the accelerator pedal. The recall expands on already-known issues by adding new models and new causes to pedal interference.

We used Social Radar to analyze conversations around Toyota.

Toyota conversation sentiment

Conversations around Toyota have been trending negative all day. Currently 70% of Toyota conversations are negative.

Toyota conversation topic cloud

Almost every major topic of conversation is red (negative). The word ‘recall’ is currently being mentioned in 55% of Toyota conversations online.

General Motors sentiment

On the other hand, two years after filing for bankruptcy protection, General Motors (GM) posted 2010 results that were its strongest annual performance in more than a decade and forecast further growth this year. GM earned $4.7 billion for the year, its first profit since 2004 and its best performance since 1999. GM chatter is currently 71% positive.

GM and Toyota are currently generating a similar amount of conversations overall. Will positive conversations around GM and negative conversations around Toyota reflect the sales numbers in the months ahead?

The U.S. economy is in shambles. Global warming is melting the polar ice caps. General Motors re-entered Wall Street with a new IPO. The FDA warned of dangers in caffeinated alcohol drinks. FarmVille creator Zynga announced a new CityVille game. Google launched its first fashion endeavor Boutiques.com.

But all of these stories were overshadowed this week by Prince William’s announcement that he will marry longtime girlfriend Kate Middleton.

What does this say about our country?

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.