A recent report by Axios shows that Toyota’s contributions to election objector GOP’s significantly higher than other corporations. As with all statistics, the devil is in the detail. Toyota is the second biggest contributor to members of congress, second only to Cubis Corp, a defense contractor.

Corporations are rightly reluctant to get involved in local politics, so it is probably worth thinking about it from the perspective of their specific needs and not so much as a political statement. However, when asked about this, Toyota’s response was rather disappointing:

We do not believe it is appropriate to judge members of Congress solely based on their votes on the electoral certification.

Seriously, Toyota? This is the best you can do? Let’s see what happened though. We created a feed with the following boolean search query:

+toyota +(gop contribution donation congress)

And we looked at both Twitter and Instagram.

As you can see, the negative sentiment is quickly climbing, currently at 27% negative mentions. I would caution from looking at this and dismissing it as a crisis averted. History has shown us that issues like this can easily sit out for a long period, before resurfacing against with a vengeance. It is precisely why we keep a close eye at how conversations are moving.

As this is a divisive issue, we expect to see positive sentiment to counter the negative. However, the real question is, is this the hill Toyota wants to die on?

https://twitter.com/elzubeir_mo/status/1409356416096342016

It’s early and I suspect this issue will escalate. So far, it’s not looking good for Toyota.

Social Listening for Crisis Management

Social listening is one of many components of crisis management, and acts as a cost effective way to gauge consumer sentiments in real-time.

The first thing we have done here is created the feed that would capture Toyota mentions in relation to donations to the GOP. We then start observing the trends as they emerge.

As themes begin to emerge through word clouds, we can then set up new feeds to monitor those specific themes as well. Additionally, influencers on the subject will become more apparent as we continue to monitor and analyze results.

Setting up alerts to notify the stakeholders in your organization is just as important as listening to the right conversations. Having the ability to manage recipients and segmenting them into different groups is what separates professional tools from hobbyists.

Originally published at https://www.getrevue.co on June 30, 2021.