I recently met Christopher Barger (Director of Global Social Media for General Motors) via a comment on my blog post about social media marketing.

The article was titled “Who Is Winning At Social Media Marketing: Ford or General Motors?“, where I made some statements and observations that he didn’t agree with, (you can read the article and the comment here .. Christopher’s comment is the second from the top).

He also mentioned that they were about to embark on a social media marketing campaign which involved the Chevy brand and was titled “Chevrolet’s SXSW Road Trip Challenge” and I wrote about this in an article with the headline “General Motors Gets Into Gear With A Social Media Competition” which is described by the website as follows:

“Starting the week of March 8 (the week before SXSW), eight  teams of social media folks from across the United States will embark on a combination  road trip/scavenger hunt competition from their hometowns to Austin behind the wheel of some of Chevy’s newest products. Along the way they’ll need to complete 50 “challenges” in order to determine the winner. The winning team will be the one that not only has completed the most challenges, but has done the most interacting with their community on Twitter and their own sites”

One of the clever strategies was the selection of socially vibrant participants in the social media competition.

You can watch the following video to hear Stephen Clark from WXYZ “TV” describe how the competition would play out.

Christopher also offered to update me and my readers on the status of the competition and its results, so after a DM (Direct Message) requesting an update, he replied with the following response via email which provides a great insight into how General Motors is indeed “getting into gear with social media“.

So here is Christopher Barger’s update on the Chevy Social Media Marketing Competition:

“Hi Jeff — sorry it took so long to get these to you (he is obviously busy, which is a good sign.. my comment). Before you look them over, I want to add this caveat:  these are only short-term measurements of success, in my/our eyes. The numbers are great — I’m thrilled with the initial results and increased visibility and connection for Chevrolet.  But for our SXSW program to truly be considered a success, I will be looking months down the line…

If I look at things in the fourth quarter, for example,

• How many of the people who began interacting with us during SXSW are still connected to and connecting with Chevrolet?
• Do we see more RTs or see the messages/info we put out becoming more pervasive across Twitter or other networks?
• Do we see more people watching our video content on FB, or embedding the YouTube videos?
• How many of the people we met or started talking to during SXSW are coming to local Tweetups when we organize them?
• Will any of them have asked for information on new Chevy vehicles or if we know if their local dealer is engaged in social networks?
• Could we offer codes or something that allows us to measure whether anyone who started following us during this activation is actually buying a vehicle?

He goes on to say

If we don’t see continued engagement long-term — and it’s on *us* to make sure we do strong follow-ups and continue the relationships we started, continue to do both online and real-world interaction with our new friends — then this was a nine day marketing campaign that worked really well.  I would consider that a lost opportunity to go well beyond.

I think that by any measure we succeeded in improving Chevrolet’s reputation and perception in the digital/social world… it even bled into the traditional marketing world, with AdAge noting that we were largely seen as the festival’s marketing winner. But in the end, we’re all in business to do business… so I’ll be watching to see how the consideration and sales numbers play out too. That said, here are the short-term measurements:

Here are The 9 Reasons For Christopher and General Motors To Smile

1. 61.1 Million social web impressions from March 8 to 21 (with overwhelmingly well above 98% of those being positive, as far as the reports and measurements that I saw) with
2. 15,924 online mentions including
3. 13,440 Tweets (this is more than double the number of tweets about Chevy in Jan-Feb)
   
4. 1,216 blog posts
   
5. 1,268 other posts (including comments, photos and videos)
   
6. 33,500 page views through Facebook and ChevySXSW.com
   
7. More than 300 pieces of positive user-generated content posted to ChevySXSW.com (including 250+ videos)
   
8. Chevrolet added 8,764 fans to its Facebook page (up 12.7% in 3 weeks);
   
9. @Chevrolet Twitter followers were up +68% in the month of our SXSW activation

Social web influencers like Guy Kawasaki, Robert Scoble, Jason Falls, Leo LaPorte, Chris Heuer, Joseph Jaffe, Dom Sagolla, C.C. Chapman and others drove and posted positively about  the Chevy Volt, reaching hundreds of thousands more people than we could have reached on our own.”

On the traditional marketing side of the Chevy marketing campaign: Christopher said:

“More than 250 “traditional media” placements generated more than 80 million impressions; included USA Today, C/Net, AdAge, AdWeek, BrandWeek, Charlotte Observer, Detroit Free Press, WXYZ-TV, the Austin American-Statesman, and others. In some cases the road trip teams took it upon themselves to pitch media to generate coverage for the road trip *on our behalf,* without being asked to do so.

I’m proud of what we’ve achieved so far — but please remember that to us it’s just a start.  I’m reserving final judgment on the program’s long-term success until I see how we do with the follow-up and long-term interaction.”

Christopher Barger
Director, Global Social Media, General Motors

If you want to tweet Christopher his Twitter address is @Cbarger

What I have enjoyed about the discussion on this topic is that the Americans love their cars and will defend their preferred car brand with a passion and the tweets and the comments about the topic have certainly displayed that.

So what do you think about the success of the Chevy social media marketing competition?

I wrote a post a couple of days ago about Ford vs General Motors and which company was currently winning at social media marketing. Christopher Barger, Director of Social Media at GM responded to my blog post on a weekend, within a few hours (you have to be impressed by that) … and on a Sunday, with a lengthy comment. In essence he disputed the recency of some of my sources, but didn’t argue with the main thrust of my blog regarding General Motors not  proactively engaging with social media rather than just reacting (read the post and the comment here). He also informed me that the post was timely and that General Motors was about to engage in a Social Media Marketing Competition starting the next day (March 8), which would be crowd sourcing “social media folk’s” contribution online as they compete for the main prize. So GM have not been asleep at the wheel, but merely cruising, but that is all about to change as they hit the loud pedal.

So what is the competition according to GM’s Blog post titled “Chevrolet’s SXSW Road Trip Challenge” ?

“Starting the week of March 8 (the week before SXSW), eight  teams of social media folks from across the United States will embark on a combination  road trip/scavenger hunt competition from their hometowns to Austin behind the wheel of some of Chevy’s newest products. Along the way they’ll need to complete 50 “challenges” in order to determine the winner. The winning team will be the one that not only has completed the most challenges, but has done the most interacting with their community on Twitter and their own sites. But what’s really going to be fun is that you get to help us decide all of the tasks the teams are going to have to complete along the way!

Here’s how it works: starting today and running through February 28^th, we’re asking you to submit your ideas to @chevrolet on Twitter, or to facebook.com/Chevrolet, of the challenges you’d like to see the eight teams complete on their trip. We’re selecting 10 tasks  from each of five different categories:  Charity (ex: stop at an animal shelter and walk the dogs), Collection (ex: collect a sample of water from a famous body of water near you), Physical Challenge (ex: climb a rock wall, or stuff your trunk full of balloons), Interaction (ex: meet up w/one of your followers and give them a test drive, or get a group of people to sing a famous song, flash-mob style), and Digital Image (ex: take a photo of a cactus or rock that looks uncannily like one of your team members). We’ll take our favorite 45 ideas that come in to @chevrolet or to the teams involved, and make them required missions for the teams on the road trip. (We’re going to pick one challenge for each category ourselves; hey, it’s our promotion, so we get to pick at least one, right?) On March 8, when the teams are starting to head off to Austin, we’ll reveal the 50 missions – and then you get to follow along and see how they’re doing!”

To  follow the competition go to Chevrolet’s Facebook page or checkout Chevrolet on  Twitter. 

I have asked Chris to to provide updated information on the progress of the competition. So if I hear more from him and the Social Media Team at GM I will keep you posted.

What do you think of General Motors Chevy Social Media competition?

“Ford Motor Company beats General Motors Company in monthly sales in February for the first time since 1998″ says Business Week.

Since writing an article about Ford and its social media marketing competition with the Ford Fiesta, I thought it  be worth taking a look at social media marketing by the other large auto makers. So in recalling some blog posts on General Motors that I had read last year on David Meerman Scott’s blog, I decided to delve a little deeper. So let’s have a look at General Motors and how they are approaching social media.

General Motors

My initial encounter with GM and their use of social media came to my attention when David  posted a blog chiding them on their marketing strategy, where he made 5 suggestions on what they should be doing with social media .

From that blog post and the tweeting of the post on Twitter, General Motors  management reacted to the negative comments by David and arranged for him to meet senior management where he interviewed key staff.

One of the online video interviews was with Christopher Barger – Director, Social Media for General Motors and from the interview I found four revelations from that interview rather revealing

• GM are monitoring conversations on Tweetdeck
• The team of five directly involved in social media is being reduced to three
• General Motors use an external agency to listen in to blogs
• They react to negative conversations online whether that be a blog or on Twitter

What I found disturbing was that in not one part of the interview was there a mention of what GM were actively doing to promote and create positive Buzz online… (like Ford’s Fiesta Project)

In his final interview with General Motors David interviewed Mary Henige who is responsible for both broadcast communications and social media.

Her final comment about GM in the interview was rather telling when she said

“We have to get over the control issue”

In another article that referenced General Motors by ZDNet they reported on a a panel discussion at a workshop at Supernova on the rise of social media, including marketing whizzes from General Motors and Proctor & Gamble  and here are some of the comments gleaned from the discussion.

Michael Wiley, GM director of new media.

• “The existing ad paradigm sucks, it’s woefully inefficient. It takes huge dollars to create ads on TV that run for 30 or 60 seconds and give the consumer virtually no information,” Wiley said. “The opportunity is to create relatively grassroots ads, six to eight minutes long that give an in depth brand experience and are released online.”
  

• “The secret to GM’s success is listening to conversations, including the negative comments. GM has blogs and comments on posts frequently bash and criticize the company’s products. You need to be open to criticism and willing to enage detractors.”

Comment one is  still a mass media strategy and not an interactive social media implementation and comment two is a reactive strategy. It still seems that GM is not getting it.

Also commenting on the panel was Curt Hecht, executive vice president of GM Planworks (GM Planworks, a unit of Publicis Groupe’s Starcom MediaVest Group, handles all buying and planning for GM’s more than $3 billion account), he added.

“Enthusiasts and word of mouth is frickin huge for automotive. We haven’t leveraged that relationship yet. It’s a way to bring value to both parties…the voice could be larger than the Wall Street Journal [in influencing purchase decisions]. We just need to find the brand advocates,” he continued.

What is interesting is that Ford is already doing this.

In his final interview with General Motors David interviewed Mary Henige who is responsible for both broadcast communications and social media. The main thrust of the interview was about GM telling stories which is good idea in itself, but stories that are told by friends to friends (Social Media Word of Mouth) such as Ford has implemented is much more powerful strategy to create online Buzz and awareness.

Her comment about GM’s culture  in the interview was rather telling when she said

“We have to get over the control issue”

In summary General Motors approach has been very controlled and blog centric with a presence on the social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. You will notice that except for comments the content is all created by GM, with no almost no user generated content, so in essence General Motors approach is very much one of control and reacting rather than being proactive and and positive.

Ford

Ford’s social media strategy on the other hand is one of engaging their target audience and letting them have their voice. One example that I covered in a recent post is the Ford Fiesta Project where 100 socially vibrant individuals were chosen from a competition where they had to submit a YouTube video to be chosen to drive for free a Ford Fiesta for 6 months (read my report on this at “The 7 Secrets to Ford’s Social Media Marketing Success” post). This was so successful that Scott Monty and his team are now running a second competition called “Fiesta Movement 2” Where 20 teams of agents are handing over the keys to their cities, working with the best local talent to reimagine the way Fiesta gets advertised. Winners get their own 2011 Ford Fiesta (and all the glory).

You will notice on their  multiple Social Media channels of

• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Flickr

That there is a lot more content created by the fans of Ford (crowd sourced content) than GM’s strategy of controlled content from the GM beauracracy.

Scott Monty’s comment on a video interview at Blog World Las Vegas was on the money when he said that they do things on social media a lot different to their competitors.

Stan Joosten, innovation manger at P&G at the panel discussion at SuperNova said “Consumers are pushing companies to an interaction-based model and away from the traditional advertising model”,

The other benefit to effective crowd sourced content is that is free and much more effective and powerful than anything you as a company can achieve through telling. The trick is motivating others to tell your story and that is where the true power of social media marketing lies.

So what is the best strategy?

• Proactive (Ford) vs Reactive  (General Motors)
• Positive (Ford) vs Negative (General Motors)
• Open (Ford) vs Controlled (General Motors)

What do you think?

My last post was about ” The 7 Secrets to Ford’s Social Media Marketing Success” which was primarily about the success of the Ford Fiesta Project’s social media competition. What impressed me about the Ford Fiseta Project social Media Marketing campaign was the targeting and involvement of the 100  “Socially Vibrant” participants. This enabled the  competition using social media to be amplified and awareness increased through the online social media hyperactivity of the participants throughout the entire campaign.

Today I wanted to write a post about other case studies on successful social media competitions.. (that will now be my next post).. because on coming across the “Best Bottom In The World Contest”, I discovered a case study revealing  an example of how not to run a social media campaign by “not” including social media in the marketing mix in an effective optimized manner.

Contest: Best Bottom In The World

Company: American Apparel

1. They spent a lot of money on Mass Media and reached out to large publications instead, to post the news and promote their competition. – Expensive! (Ford didn’t spend one dollar on a traditional marketing until just prior to the launch of the US Fiesta production model).

These large publications include:

1. Style List
2. The Frisky
3. New York Fashion

2. They didn’t reach out to personal fashion bloggers niche such as Fashion Toast.

She is a hugely trafficked fashion blog who advertises on her sidebar for American Apparel.  Furthermore, she is well connected to the other fashion bloggers online, so there is a strong way to leverage her sponsorship to influence others to participate.

3. Facebook Not Optimized For The Competition

Theyshould have created a Facebook Application that allows fan to upload their image directly to the FB page.  Fans can then vote through the Facebook Fan Page and tell their community who they voted for.

Their expensive mass media competition is not anywhere to be found on the Facebook page, which by the way has 193,000 Fans, who are not offered an easy way to spread the competition virally via Face book with its 400 Million members.

4. Minimal Use Of Twitter

They made an announcement on Twitter, but they could have made it so much more engaging, such as a  Twit Pic Submission. Twitter users should be able to upload an image directly from Twit pic to the AA main site.  In this way, they could generate more buzz from the Twitter community and allow for an easier submission process.

To their credit American Apparels use of YouTube seems to be more  effective for the competition with Channel Views of 33,607 and total Upload Views of 365,982

So how would you run a Social Media competition for your company?