While its rivals, GM and Chrysler, looked to Congress and the American taxpayer for a lifeline, Ford Motor Co. drove a different road, leverage social media to successfully launch itself back into the subcompact car market. Grant McCracken, writing in Harvard Business Review, explains How Ford Got Social Media Right by working with contemporary culture. He looks at the approach taken by Undercurrent, the digital strategy firm working for Ford on the “Fiesta Movement” project to launch the new Ford Fiesta:
Under the direction of Jim Farly, Group VP at Ford and Connie Fontaine, manager of brand content there, Undercurrent decided to depart from the viral marketing rule book. Bud told me they were not interested in the classic early adopters, the people who act as influencers for the rest of us. Undercurrent wanted to make contact with a very specific group of people, a passionate group of culture creators.
… I think the Fiesta Movement gives us new clarity. It’s a three-step process.
- Engage culturally creative consumers to create content.
- Encourage them to distribute this content on social networks and digital markets in the form of a digital currency.
- Craft this [as] a way that it rebounds to the credit of the brand, turning digital currency (and narrative meaning) into a value for the brand.
Ford’s success comes because it didn’t forget that the “social” in “social media” refers to people, not the electronic pipes that connect them, and that people – online or off – are still people, who still act in normal, human ways.
#1 by Steve G on January 30th, 2010
What Obama and Pelosi don’t seem to understand is that the American people don’t just dislike the ponytails Big Sister has given them…they want the federal government out of their hair altogether.
You’d be hard-pressed to find better commentary on the President’s SOTU address than this: http://rjmoeller.com/2010/01/a-speech-to-remember-to-forget/