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May 2008: Social influence marketing

Conversational marketing: The art of talking with your customers, not at them

By Ben Bloom

A PR manager for a major electronics manufacturer once told me he was deathly afraid that members of a popular bulletin board would figure out that his firm was monitoring the forum. The company had already introduced a major product innovation that had been inspired by activity on the board and he feared a backlash if members connected the dots.

If he and his company had followed the example of William Sanders, better known as Starwood Lurker, he wouldn’t have had anything to worry about. An activity such as an employee trolling industry boards would be viewed as another way to connect with current and potential customers. For eight years Sanders was a regular poster on FlyerTalk, one of the most active travel message boards. He regularly checked and replied to postings about his employer, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, and was transparent about his employee status. (His FlyerTalk successor is Starwood Lurker II.)

Beyond monitoring, companies making an attempt at social media marketing expose two main tactics: engaging in conversations and distributing social press releases. The most successful efforts usually have one trait in common – they are mindful of the native culture. Conversely, there are countless examples of corporations using social media in un-social or inauthentic ways, such as a blog that does not allow comments or a ghost-written blog. Coordinating social media interactions to keep them both true to the brand and useful to the consumer represents the real challenge.

Saturn employees keep the social fire stoked

Should automakers be creating social networks?
With more than 20 percent of U.S. online consumers already visiting one or more social networking sites at least weekly, Saturn’s ImSaturn network had an uphill battle when it launched last month. Creating a social network assumes that there is a set of interactions between consumers – and in these cases, marketers – that cannot be had in their existing networks. One might assume that most online automotive enthusiasts are already connected to their “gearhead” buddies via existing social tools. What is it that ImSaturn provides that’s unique?

For starters, the site displays a significant commitment from the Saturn employees who are adding content and managing the site. These contributions are a big part of what made this a good site at the start.

The site is build on top of Ning, the white-label social network. The site has undergone a fair bit of customization and earns high marks for presentation.

The Saturn marketing team blog, which tracks employee appearances at fairs and other public events, showcases the team connecting with fans of the brand. The team responds to users in the comments and points out related forum posts on the site.

The site helps introduce members of the product team to visitors through the comments they post about vehicle releases, features and marketing strategies. While responding to rumor, speculation and conjecture is undoubtedly a risky behavior for a full-time employee, the ImSaturn site aims to create a special community where this behavior is appreciated and in context. The “featured blog posts” on the homepage spotlight contributions from non-employee members and are a good indication of the vibrant nature of the community. This post by a Saturn owner illustrates how a user sharing a story can become an authentic sales message and be more powerful than a brochure or 30-second spot. An Internet Sales Manager at an Illinois Saturn dealership has already noticed this owner testimony and commented on the user’s blog.

How powerful is this community? A month and a half after launch there are nearly 1,600 tuners, dealer internet reps and Saturn team members and fans on the site. Useful and meaningful opportunities exist to further the image of the Saturn brand and cultivate a real community. What remains to be seen is how quickly the site will grow.

An editorial approach to disseminating product information
The Ford Motor Company Global Auto Shows site performs a unique function in publishing photos, videos and short reports on introduction and concept vehicles showcased by the company’s brands at auto shows around the world. (Full disclosure: this site was developed by AA|RF).

Reveals and reactions pour into Ford’s Global Auto Shows site

Built on the open-source blog platform WordPress, the site is social to the core. Users can comment – both positively and negatively, comments are censored only when inappropriate language is used – on each featured vehicle. The consolidation of auto show-related posts into one site, along with an effort to develop compelling original content at each show, has helped the site grow significantly, and organically, since its January 2007 launch.

The site does an excellent job of showcasing the raw energy and emotion of car buyers, particularly those who look to the concept car announcements at each show for a hint at what the manufacturer is thinking. The site offers nearly the same insight consumer perceptions of early designs. On the page for the Ford Interceptor concept, which is essentially a muscle car in sedan form, comments like “I want one” outnumber nearly any other sentiment. It also reflects dissatisfaction with some existing products. On the 2008 Ford Focus Coupé-Cabriolet page, there are numerous references to how the European version is considerably more attractive than the domestic offering.

The site enables consumers to create their own conversations around the Ford brand with a broad smattering of social bookmarking and syndication tools. In a significant step, Ford has recently moved forward to occasionally answer consumer questions that surface in the site’s comments. This represents the middle ground between monitoring and conversing.

Press releases or monitoring?
Both the GM FastLane blog, with posts by GM executives, including Vice Chairman Bob Lutz, and the Toyota Open Road blog are in the same category – corporate blogs that use the medium as a brand communications channel. Each blog has interesting posts with comments enabled, another heartening gesture, but both sites fall short of facilitating a real dialogue with the company. Many of the FastLane posts are little more than press releases with comments – 50-plus on some posts. The Open Road blog ranges from sparse comments (one or none on some articles) to a veritable firestorm (150-plus comments) surrounding a post covering a $20 million grant to the Audubon Society. Toyota clarified its position with a follow-up post – the company is listening, but it’s not a live conversation.

GM continues to provoke the blogosphere

The blogs differ significantly, however, in their implementation of Twitter as a way to publicize blog posts. The GM implementation features an energetic real person – who twittered his identity as PR guy Adam Denison – responding to five to 10 people each day via the GMblogs Twitter account and occasionally announcing new social media efforts. The stream of tweets is friendly and knowledgeable, and in true acceptance of the medium of Twitter, honestly uses @messages to give recognition as well as direct attention.

Toyota’s Open Road Twitter account sent me a private message after I began following, but the account seems to send 90 percent links to blog posts, media announcements or car-buying advice. While the conversational and link-sharing nature of the posts fits in very well with twitter, it fails to truly participate in a conversation.

Virtually all interactions between the customer and OEMs are part of the customer experience. Efforts that cut through the clutter are increasingly conversational in nature and actively seek to engage customers in an authentic and flexible way. Whereas the traditional model for this interaction insulates managers and product developers from such interactions, the most successful social media initiatives will be ones that turn this around, the ones that create true conversations with customers.

Talk back
What kinds of strategies have been deployed in automotive and are they working? This post examined several efforts at conversational marketing; I’d love to hear about other examples in the comments.

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