Google gobbled up Motorola, and social consumers love it

(Editor’s note: Lisa Joy Rosner is the CMO of NetBase. She submitted this column to VentureBeat.)

Currently, there are 5 billion cell phone subscriptions worldwide, with 73 million of those attributed to American smartphone users. This market is hot, and yesterday Google got in on the action when it announced its acquisition of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion.

Since smartphones have become the gateway to social media, NetBase analyzed what people are saying on the web about this union using the NetBase Insight Workbench, a social media analysis tool which accesses the ConsumerBase index of over 20 billion sound bites from the last 12 months. To arrive at a “net sentiment” score, we calculated the difference between positive and negative remarks, divided by the overall number of those comments, generating Google’s net sentiment following the acquisition.

As you can see in the chart below, the data reflects that social media was buzzing about the search engine giant’s latest move. Over 40 percent of yesterday’s chatter about Google revolved around its acquisition of Motorola Mobility, and a trend line for the day showed that sentiment was net positive with a net sentiment score of 34.

This NetBase-generated chart shows the breakdown of positive vs. negative sentiment for Google, filtered by Motorola, from August 14 to 16, 2011. The blue line is the net sentiment.

Where was most of the data coming from? Well, Twitter, which is a place that people go to express their gut reactions to news, accounted for the highest distribution of the chatter with 45 percent of the conversations, followed by blogs and news sites.

This pie chart shows a breakdown of the top 10 online sources for the chatter surrounding Google’s acquisition of Motorola.

Sound bites pulled from the chatter showed that many people love the deal. Much of the verbatim reflected the belief that this new move would both “accelerate innovation” and “enhance competition” within the industry.

And yes, I’m loving the Google/Motorola deal [@bhern]

My favorite mobile phone brand Motorola was bought by my favorite company Google!! [JC John Sese Cuneta]

The combination of Google and Motorola will not only supercharge Android, but will also enhance competition and offer consumers accelerating innovation, greater choice, and wonderful user experiences. [HankRearden]

However, the feedback hasn’t all been all positive. The naysayers and skeptics had their moment on the Twitter feed as well, expressing hate as well as concern about how the consequences of the acquisition will affect them as consumers.

Now I hate Google, they acquired Motorola, and will now ensure that the other phone manufactures lose business. [@sat_u2]

I’m not too excited to see #Google acquire #Motorola Mobility. I wasn’t a fan of the new Moto phones. I support HTC. [@hanzharis]

AS someone who’s followed them from the beginning, I’m really disappointed in Google. [Prof. Peabody]

And many more online consumers postulated about the future of the industry and how this will affect the other power players — namely, Apple.

For investors, that represents a 63 percent premium on its closing price last Friday. Google’s acquisition means that it now will compete with Apple head on with mobile phones as it will now produce its own phones. Google notes that it [Google] will “supercharge the Android ecosystem and will enhance competition” — however, the deal could also alienate some of its other backers, such as HTC and Samsung. [Terence Huynh]

We could have a very different smartphone game going one year from now. [fierywater]

Impressed with Google’s swift action but can’t say didn’t see it coming. [arsenekarl]

Google buying Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion is a great start, but certainly not the end of it. [@ABI_4G]

I love how brilliant Google is. This is a company of engineers; they would never make such an egregious miscalculation as to swallow Motorola for its patent portfolio or even its hardware. All of this is playing out like a game of chess: Apple and Microsoft — your move. [DeLano Jackson]

I would LOVE to see Google take the patent war into their own hands, buying some ownership from every Android manufacturer (HTC, Motorola, Samsung, etc.) if necessary and leaving Apple crawling begging for a settlement agreement. [Stealth Pyros]

So there you have it. Despite a dose of cynicism about Google’s latest play, social consumers are passionate, intrigued and excited about what will follow. The industry is a big chessboard and Google just made a huge move.  What’s next and where do you stand on the sentiment line?

This post was written by Lisa Joy Rosner, the CMO of NetBase. She has more than twenty years of B2B marketing experience at companies like Oracle, BroadVision and MyBuys. She can be reached at @lisajoyrosner and lrosner@netbase.com.