Ford’s social media efforts from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Scott Monty & team take inte­grated approach rather than focus on short-term campaigns

Major cor­po­ra­tions have begun jump­ing into the social media pool. One of the biggest suc­cess sto­ries this year has been the per­for­mance of Ford Motor Co. — they’re mak­ing big waves but aren’t splash­ing around, thanks to the inte­grated approach taken by Scott Monty, head of social media, who joined Ford only in the sum­mer of 2008.

I caught up with Scott shortly after his keynote chat with the Wall Street Journal’s Kara Swisher at Blog­world Expo. Their BWE con­ver­sa­tion was largely inaudi­ble, so this 6-minute inter­view serves as a quick syn­op­sis of what Ford is up to in the space.

“We don’t think of social media at Ford in terms of cam­paigns,” Scott says, “because it’s a com­mit­ment. It’s about chang­ing about the busi­ness model and embrac­ing it day in and day out.”

From top to bot­tom, Ford has infused the com­pany with the Zeit­gest of social media — employ­ees feel a con­nec­tion with their cus­tomers and a sense of hav­ing skin in the game. Social media helps put a human face on the com­pany. “It serves to remind peo­ple there are real human beings work­ing at Ford Motor Co. who are pas­sion­ate about great prod­ucts,” he says.

Watch, embed or down­load the video on Vimeo

Given Ford’s strong per­for­mance in recent months, includ­ing a $997 mil­lion third-quarter profit, sev­eral pub­li­ca­tions sug­gested that social media could be one of the key dri­vers of the company’s recent suc­cess. Accord­ing to Busi­ness­Week, the automaker will spend 25% of their mar­ket­ing bud­get on dig­i­tal and social media this year.

Three weeks ago Ford won the Soci­ety for New Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Research’s award for brand of the year for its “inno­v­a­tive use of social media to improve the way the com­pany com­mu­ni­cates with its stake­hold­ers.” A cou­ple of the notable social media pro­grams Ford has launched include:

• Fiesta Move­ment: Ford has given 100 “socially vibrant” peo­ple on the Web a Ford Fiesta (includ­ing Sarah Austin of @pop17) for 6 months. The Fiesta is a Euro­pean car that Ford will begin pro­duc­ing in the U.S. in 2010. The 100 “agents” get to do what­ever they want — tweet, take pho­tos or videos, blog — and Monty’s team aggre­gates the con­ver­sa­tions on Fiestamovement.com with­out edit­ing it.

He adds: “At the end of 6 months they return the cars and we get real-time feed­back from them that we’ve fed into our engi­neer­ing team to make tweaks to the North Amer­i­can pro­duc­tion ver­sion.” It’s a com­bi­na­tion of crowd­sourc­ing as well as dig­i­tal buzz. “Ulti­mately what we’ve got is 50,000 hand-raisers who have seen the Fiesta online or in per­son who’ve said they want to know more about it when it comes out.” Fully 97 per­cent of those peo­ple do not cur­rently drive Ford vehicles.

As a result, there’s already a 38 per­cent aware­ness of the Ford Fiesta in the mar­ket­place, a phe­nom­e­nal rate given that they haven’t spent a dol­lar in tra­di­tional adver­tis­ing, Monty says.

• TheFordStory.com offers vieos, pho­tos and arti­cles about Ford, its employ­ees and customers. 

Monty also dis­cusses why it’s impor­tant for cor­po­ra­tions to get involved in social media if their cus­tomers are already talk­ing about your brand, prod­ucts or services

Related

• Inter­view with Ford CEO Alan Mulally (Socialmedia.biz)

• Ford’s $1 Bil­lion Q3 Profit: Does Social Media Deserve Credit? (Mediaite)

• Ford’s Social Media Guru Scott Monty: “Social Media Is the Cocaine of the Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Indus­try” (Kara Swisher at D)

• Inter­view with Scott Monty (buzzcast)

Related arti­cles by Zemanta

• Ford Fiesta Move­ment: Can Social Media Sell Cars? (mashable.com)
• A CEO’s social media moment (wheelontheweb.wordpress.com)
• #Social­Me­dia TweetChat led by Scott Monty-A dif­fer­ent approach (directmarketingobservations.com)
• How Ford Made Its Come­back (online.wsj.com)
• Ford’s Fiesta Move­ment — Brand Ambas­sadors (viralblog.com)

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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