Social Media Marketing: Success Story – “Ford Chapter 1 Fiesta Movement”

Fiesta movement was basically an extended six month test drive of the Ford Fiesta in advance of the launch in the US. It involved selecting 100 socially vibrant individuals, who were provided with the European version of the Ford Fiesta 18 months prior to it being manufactured and released in the United States of America. These socially media aware fanatics were encouraged to share their experience with the Ford Fiesta over the 6 months on their Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube channels etc. Let’s analyze this on the 5 parameters.

1.   Understanding the Medium: They selected individuals that were very active on online space. They were people who've learned how to earn a fan community of their own, who can craft a true narrative video and they're always looking for more content to create. Online medium works on user generated content and Ford gave that power to their users.

2.    Positive and Negative Reactions: Ford had 24X7 customer care services and treated the individuals as partners and their negative criticism was taken for constructive improvement.

3.   Objective: Their objective was to create a buzz before the launch of the car and create awareness about the product. The whole strategy was designed around this goal and it was a huge success.

4.    Engagement: Ford gave their partners monthly tasks and asked them to document and share it. They used the car for various activities like food delivery, adventure trips and even eloping. These videos were published by them on various online media. Others could relate to it and developed a relationship with the car.

5.   Return on Investment: Their prime objective was to create a buzz and there were 11 million Social Networking impressions, 5 million engagements on social networks (people sharing and receiving), 11,000 videos posted, 15,000 tweets (not including re-tweets) and 13,000 photos. In the metrics that already existed in the automobile industry:

a.      50,000 hand raisers who have seen the product in person or on a video who said that they want to know more about it when it comes out and 97% of those don’t currently drive a Ford vehicle.

b.    38% awareness by Gen Y about the product, without spending a dollar on traditional advertising (Fords model “Fusion” doesn’t have that awareness after 2 years of being out in production and yet it has received hundreds of millions of dollars in traditional marketing spend).

c.     10 times higher conversion ratio of people booking and buying the car as compared to a normal car with normal promotion.

This campaign is true application of Web 2.0 where user generated content played the trick. As people trust corporations less, with the rise of social media you need to allow other people through word of mouth create trust for you through Social Media (it amplifies your message) and reach out to those who are listening and let them further do the talking for you and connect with people like themselves.