Sean “Diddy” Combs has 2,269,623 followers and counting on Twitter. He is an icon in his own right but with this kind of following a company would never need to use traditional advertising.
Ford does not compare to Mr. Combs but does a good job in using Twitter to segment its market as well as an extension of its other marketing efforts. The use of Twitter and other social media has contributed to Ford’s heightened awareness and strong brand building online.
For example, in April, the automaker, asked 100 influential bloggers to test drive its new Fiesta for a six month period, and post their opinions of the car on Twitter as well as Facebook. By October, it was estimated that the resulting material received 4.3 million hits on YouTube and 3 million comments on Twitter, while 540,000 people had viewed photos hosted on Flickr. “To get 60% awareness in traditional media, it costs somewhere north of $50 million,” said Jim Farley, Ford’s group vice president of global marketing. A Yahoo or Google page takeover actually gets more eyeballs than a network TV commercial now. That hasn’t happened before” (WARC, 2009).
The Ford Fiesta has its own Twitter page and 5279 followers. That’s more than some companies total in followers alone. Despite the fact that the Fiesta will not be available until mid 2010, this type of product awareness and brand building is extreme.
Ford has proved how social media can be positively integrated into the mix by allowing bloggers the opportunity to share information. It is often thought that bloggers can either be to a company’s benefit or to its demise. In this case, utilizing bloggers led to the successful launch of the Ford Fiesta before it has even made it to the marketplace.
Ford also serves as a great example of how social media can be successfully integrated into a marketing campaign and yield results that deliver a tremendous ROI as well as great market penetration. Ford has proven that social media has its place and any company that resists using social media is truly at a loss. Social media is not to be ignored and the key is truly finding the correct balance with other traditional media while encouraging freedom of expression and creating a sense of community.
WARC. (20 November 2009). Ford, Starbucks gain from digital media. Retrieved on November 22, 2009, from http://www.warc.com/News/TopNews.asp?ID=25969&Origin=WARCNewsEmail
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