Social Media Marketing at Ford

5 11 2010

This is a follow-up to an earlier blog that I wrote about Ford and social media marketing.  They are continuing to do some great things over there.

The Ford Fiesta Movement

Ford launched the Ford Fiesta in this country entirely with social media marketing campaign called the Ford Fiesta Movement.

  • Ford gave 100 Fiestas to online personalities free for six months
  • The personalities were challenged to a contest where they got points for creating online content about the cars
  • Results at the time of launch
    • Over six million YouTube views
    • 740,000 Flickr images
    • 3.7 Twitter impressions
    • 80,000 people asked for more information about the Fiesta – and 97% had never owned a Ford before.
    • 40% Generation Y awareness

All this was done with zero traditional media.  It was a 100% social marketing campaign.

Ford Social Media Marketing Video

(This is really worth watching — all the way through)

Ford is not stopping there

The video here talks about how Ford is now doing a Focus Rally America event for the Ford Focus.

Here’s how Focus Rally America works (and this is creative):

  • Ford will select six teams of two people to compete in an interactive cross-country road rally.
  • The winner gets $100,000 plus 10 Ford Focus cars to give away to the people who help them the most online.
  • Clues to navigating the rally will be published online and the community will have to pick teams and support them by helping them to solve the clues.

Scott Monty, goes on to describe how Ford is using social media as a part of integrated marketing campaigns that have far more impact than traditional marketing campaigns.  These campaigns include

  • Paid media
  • Earned media
  • Owned media

The key to success, as he describes it so well, is: “It’s people talking to people about Ford, not Ford talking to people about Ford.”

The other important thing to take away from this is that Ford is generating user and interest and buzz without being gimmicky, in my opinion.  This is a fun way to generate genuine interest in their products.


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Categories : Business Models, Company Example, Inbound Marketing, Marketing Plan, Social Media, Social Media Company, Social Media Data, Social Media Marketing

Social Media Advertising – Part II

10 09 2010

Just after my recent blog (9/7/10) on this subject, I saw a very interesting article on Mashable that offers some interesting numbers and analysis around social media advertising trends.

Some of the key points of the article include:

  • eMarketer projects that social will account for 6.7% of the total online ad spend this year.
  • The 2010 spending forecast for advertising on social networks is projected at $1.68 billion in the US, up 30%
  • Total social media ad spending is expected to pass $2 billion next year.
  • The big winner in this space is Facebook, with revenues projected to pass $1 billion this year.

In addition to Facebook, the article goes on to describe Promoted Tweets on Twitter where a company can insert a brand-sponsored topic into the trending topics list.  This program is in the early stages and is well worth watching.

Why the Move to Social Media Advertising?

  • The average user is now spending more time on Facebook than on Google according to comScore.
  • Nielson says that the average person spends more than seven hours per month on Facebook.
  • It’s effective 1: Social media lets companies target their audience much with much greater exactness.  The result: context-relevant ads and messages that are useful to end-users.
  • It’s effective 2: Social media lets the community digest messages if and when the want them, rather than interrupting their TV, reading, or radio experience.
  • Location-awareness offers the prospect of making messages even more relevant, helpful, and entertaining.
  • But, maybe most important of all, social media offers the opportunity for companies to engage in a two-way conversation with their communities 24x7x356.

The bottom line is that social media is where people are spending their time.  Social media also offers an opportunity to really engage with customers rather than just “drive-by selling.”


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Categories : Business Models, Enterprise Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Marketing Plan, Social Media, Social Media Data, Social Media Marketing

The Future of Advertising

7 09 2010

In previous blogs I have shared some of the research that shows that Social Media Marketing spend is projected to increase, often at the expense of traditional marketing methods.

Since then, I have run across the interesting news that the ad click-through rate has fallen in half in the last two years. (Source: comScore)

  • 32% click-through rate in July 2007
  • 16% click-through rate in March 2009

That should not be too surprising.  As users get more comfortable with technology, they develop personal skills and technologies to block out intrusive advertising.

So, advertising spending is moving away from traditional media, and moving more towards Internet and online advertising.  At the same time we know that click-through rates on ads are falling.  The conclusion is:

  • Ads need to be contextually relevant and helpful or entertaining to readers
  • Traditional, intrusive advertising will be less and less effective
  • You will also need to look at where you are advertising

The other big shift that we are seeing in advertising higher growth in display advertising and lower growth in search advertising. (Source: comScore)

  • Search Advertising was $2.9 billion in 2009, but grew at 4%
  • Display Advertising was $2.3 billion and grew at +15%
  • Some of the hot areas in Display Advertising include:
    • Banner Ads +8%
    • Video Ads + 48%

Some of the recent news in the industry reflects this data:

  • YouTube is using their ContentID technology to identify copyrighted content on their site, but rather than removing it, they are placing relevant ads with the content.  Full Article.
  • Yahoo! Has changed its strategic focus away from search and search ads to focus more on content and display ads.  The idea being to make the ads more effective by making them contextually relevant.  Full Article.

Where is online advertising heading from here?  Here are two examples of hot areas:

  • Ads within Social Media. Facebook has ads and Twitter is expected to follow in the reasonably near future.
  • Ads in mobile apps.  One the coolest and most useful examples I have seen is the information I have seen in the augmented reality apps.  These are presented as useful information about the physical locations around your present position.

The bottom line is, no matter where you place the ad, it has to be contextually-relevant, helpful and/or entertaining or your audience will just tune you out.  (Or some clever hacker will built a way to block your message.)


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Categories : Business Models, Enterprise Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Marketing Plan, Social Media Marketing

Book Review: Open Leadership

30 08 2010

Having seen trends come and go over the years I tend to be deeply (and for good reason) suspicious of marketing hyperbole.  That’s why I really liked the book “Groundswell” by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff.  It was a lucid, practical, and level-headed approach to the coming groundswell of Social Media.

This past weekend, I finished reading Charlene Li’s most recent book, “Open Leadership” and it picks up right where Groundswell left off.  This book takes a deeper, more pragmatic, look at how to build and implement a Social Media strategy.  The key points of the book are all illustrated with real-life examples of major organizations that have gone through the process.

Many social media spokespeople are saying: be open, be transparent, be authentic.  That’s a great mantra and a great beginning. But there is a lot more to a successful social media strategy.  Exactly how does one actually go about implementing a social media strategy, especially in established enterprises that may not have the open culture required?  The devil is always in the details and there is often a lot of organizational resistance to suddenly going open:

  • Employees don’t know what to say or how to act online.
  • “That’s not the way it’s done here!”
  • Opening up is often threatening to middle managers who survive by controlling information.
  • Opening up exposes the company and individuals to criticism from outside

We all want feedback from our customers, but going open and embracing social media can be very scary.  Open Leadership goes into the how of successfully using social media in an enterprise; from giving up control, to building an open strategy, to providing the leadership required for your enterprise to successfully make the transition.

Let’s face it.  Social media is a social phenomenon that is happening in a much broader scale than just in the business world. And, there is no stopping a social phenomenon.  The only real choices are to get on board and figure out how to ride the phenomena or to get run over by it.  Social media is going to happen with or without your company’s involvement.  The question is: Do you want your customers and competitors to frame the online discussion without your presence or do you want to join in on the discussion and build lasting relationships with your customers and potential customers.

This book tells you how to go about it, step-by-step.  Highly recommended.


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Categories : Book Review, Inbound Marketing, Marketing Plan, Social Media, Social Media Marketing

What Do You Wish You Had Learned in Marketing Class?

4 08 2010

I sent out a question to a combination of my contacts and other random people on LinkedIn.  My idea was to use the wisdom of crowds to help guide the subject matter I am going to teach in my intro MBA Marketing class coming up in a couple of weeks.

The question I sent out was this:

“I am teaching an intro course to MBA Marketing in August. Question: What do you wish you had learned in your marketing class but didn’t? Or, if you never took Marketing classes, what do you wish the Marketing people you worked with had known but didn’t?”

There were some great responses.  The overwhelming response was: My marketing classes were a great foundation but too theoretical.  Marketing classes need to be much more practical, hands-on and real-world.

Other responses received from more than one respondent (in order of number of responses):

  • MBA Marketing needs to cover both B2C and B2B marketing.  B2B is often overlooked.  You also need to cover motivational marketing – what makes these buyers purchase your product?
  • Stakeholder influence.  Nobody gets to just go and implement marketing plans.  The first “sell” that every marketer has to make is either to their own organization or to a client.
  • Measuring the effectiveness of marketing.  Was your marketing program successful or not?  How do you know?
  • How to use Social Media Marketing, Marketing 2.0, and Internet Advertising
  • Driving consensus between Marketing and Product Development on the definition of the product requirements.
  • Driving product requirements based on actual market and customer needs.  Not on the available cool technology.

Other very useful responses (in no particular order):

  • How to define your target customer.
  • How to define marketing tactics that fit your target customer and the budget of your organization
  • International marketing.  There is a big world there outside the USA.
  • When to use Social Media Marketing and when to use Traditional Marketing.
  • Integrated marketing. How to use multiple marketing programs together in an integrated fashion to achieve an overall marketing goal.
  • How to drive qualified leads to the Sales Funnel.  After all, that is the primary thing marketers are asked to do.
  • How to do cheap but effective market research.
  • How to evaluate the marketing mix in relation to a new product introduction.
  • More case studies.  In other words: Keep it real.
  • More entrepreneurial marketing.  A big trend today is away from big company marketing hires and more towards marketing startups and contracting. Prepare people for this world.
  • How to price your own marketing services.  (See point above)
  • How to adjust marketing strategy and tactics based on where a product is in its lifecycle.  For example: You don’t have the same marketing strategy for a new product intro as you do for a mature product that has steady or slowly declining revenue.

My sincere thanks to everybody who responded to this question!!  This is some great input from some people with a great deal of real-life experience.  There are real-world stories and experience behind every one of these responses.

This also proves the value of the Wisdom of Crowds.


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Categories : Enterprise Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Marketing Plan, Social Media Marketing

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