Excercise 1: Tesla Motors

I chose to study Tesla Motors since it’s a local Bay Area company that I admire and I have a friend who works for them. As you may already know, Tesla Motors is a Palo Alto-based startup that designs and manufactures electric cars. Their first model was a two-seat sports car called the Tesla Roadster. Their follow-up will be the Model S four-door sedan, which will be available in 2012. While I have little hope of owning either of these cars anytime soon, I admire that they are a small auto company that is influencing the major auto companies to steer towards producing more electric and hybrid-electric vehicles.

A Google search of “Tesla Motors” produced many positive articles about the company from auto and technology blogs, as well as the New York Times. An article from Bizjournal posted today that shares of Tesla’s stock rose 8 percent. By the second and third Google pages I started seeing less positive articles, one about the small plane crash that killed several Tesla employees in February 2010, and a business investment article about how Tesla is still a very long way from turning a profit.

Using How Sociable, Tesla Motors’ visibility score was only a 225, which is relatively low compared to companies like Subaru (1202) and Honda (3421). Additionally, Technorati only produced 24 blog posts relating to Tesla Motors. Social Mention gives a sentiment ratio of 8:1, with the overwhelming majority of mentions (458 posts/tweets) having a neutral sentiment.

Tesla has three different Yelp pages and there are a total of 30 reviews from Yelpers on those pages combined. All of the ratings were either 4 or 5 stars (aside from two skeptics) but I had a hard time finding someone who actually owned one of their vehicles. Most of the reviews were similar to myself in their enthusiasm about the product from a distance, though only a few had actually test-driven one.

Tesla’s Facebook page has 26,645 fans and their Wall is filled with people postings pictures, links and mentions of Tesla, including one person’s status update: “I'm a little disappointed there wasn't a Tesla Motors commercial during the Super bowl yesterday. There were way too many GM ads...” It seems natural that a company’s Facebook page will accumulate more positive feedback than negative since the postings are from so-called “fans” but it that has not always been the case with every business that opens up their online presence to allow customer feedback.

 

Tesla Motors is very active in using social media to get the word out about their product. I didn’t notice them responding very often to people who are talking about them online. In a few cases they “like”d what someone posted on their wall, and they have retweeted tweets that they considered worth informing the public about on Twitter. But for the most part, Tesla seems content on touting their product through tweets, Facebook posts, a Vimeo page, and their own blog on their website. They are a relatively new company that doesn’t have a large share of people who actually use their product; they only recently reached the 1,500 mark of Tesla Roadsters sold. They are more or less riding high on the love people have for sports cars and/or (the concept of) electric vehicles or both. In many ways, they are still in their “buzz” stage since there are more people that know about the product than actually use the product. Because of this there is not as much of a need to actively engage their customers online. However, there may come a time when Tesla is not feeling the “love” as fervently from the public as they currently are, and it would behoove them to utilize their social media tools (Twitter, Facebook) to build connections with the public more directly and give back some of the “love”.