Ford goes digitally Social. Increases social marketing spend more than industry average.

One more example of how old world companies embracing Social media in a big way. The world seems to be changing at a faster pace than what many of us thought. Automobile companies in the US have adopted social media tools for a while to talk about their brands and listen to their customers’ feedback. However, there is no fun if the brand owners themselves talk about their brands. The idea is people talk about their brands and spread the experience through viral, blog and other social media tools.

Automobile major Ford just did that through Fiesta Movement, a very innovative and integrated social media marketing campaign for their upcoming launch Fiesta cars. The automobile giant gave away 100 Fiesta cars to people to drive and live with. The campaign delivered phenomenal results. People blew up the publicity using viral and other social media networking tools like blog, facebook, youtube, and twitter. The messages were floating everywhere on the Internet.

 The company received -

• 11 million social networking impressions

• Five million engagements on social networks (people sharing and receiving)

• 11,000 videos have been posted

• 15,000 Tweets (not including re-tweets)

• 13,000 photos

Guy Kawasaki and Twitter

Recently I had an opportunity to hear a key note speech by Guy Kawasaki in Bangalore, India. He was the inaugural key note speaker at this year's NASSCOM Product Conclave event held in Bangalore on October 27-28. The auditorium was bustling with budding entrepreneurs, techies, social media enthusiasts, and marketing gurus. This was my first opportunity to hear Guy live and it was worth every second. Though I heard his podcasts, numerous web events and saw YouTube videos, but this was different.

Guy delivered a speech on Entrepreneurship 2.0. He said, if one needs to make it big, he needs to jump the curve. 10% better will not work. He started his presentation with this thought. His prescription to Enterprise 2.0 organizations are -

1. Build what you want to use
2. Pay '0' Rs. for Tools
3. Pay '0'Rs for Marketing
4. Suck down/across
5. Use Twitter (and Tweetmeme)
6. Pay '0' Rs for People
7. Put everything in the cloud
8. Ship then test
9. Forget venture capital
10. Niche thyself

Guy has been a big evangelizer of all social media tools, particularly tweeter. In his words, 'Using Tweeter, one can single handedly manage the entire marketing efforts without spending a cent'.

Guy Kawasaki can be followed on Twitter @GuyKawasaki. He also writes a blog, called 'How to Change the World'.