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?

Earlier this year, Toyota announced a series of recalls for many of their most popular models. The uproar in media has definitely impacted Toyota sales, not to mention their overall reputation as America’s top selling auto brand. So what did Toyota do to manage this crisis? They took to the world of social media. Now to answer the question that everyone is dying to know: is it working?

Here we see the rise in social media activity from the end of 2009 to present day. The number of raw posts has quadrupled, hitting a high point of nearly 120,000 posts in a single day. Today’s biggest related news: The Run Away Prius.

Looking at sentiment, to the left we see an analysis of how people felt about Toyota pre-incident. To the right, you can see the influx of negativity as it increases about 30%. And it doesn’t seem to be calming down one little bit.

Above is an illustration of sentiment over time. As you can see, the red line (which depicts negativity) has yet to show a distinct decline, meaning that people are still upset and Toyota needs to try harder at resolving these issues. Hmm.. now if only they could figure out where to start…

By looking at this classification of buzz, it looks like they should start with Twitter as it is pulling in the biggest portion of the traffic. Toyota has a big following on Twitter whether they’re direct followers or not. It’s time for Toyota to accelerate and start reaching out one to one.

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.