Case Studies: Ford

Social media can generate quite a bit of success for your brand, and for Ford, their strategy and the lessons they pulled should be adopted by any brand looking to succeed on social media.

At a recent conference, Scott Monty, the Global Head of Social Media for the Ford Motor Company gave a presentation detailing the success of Ford’s social media campaigns in recent years entitled, “Social Wheels in Motion: Ford’s Lesson in Social Media.”

Of course, with so much success in social media over the last few years, Ford was bound to pull away a few key lessons that any brand should adopt with regards to their social media program. Below are the five top lessons you can pull away from Monty’s presentation and apply to your social media program today.

Stand By Your Product and Let Your Audience Share

In 2009, for the launch of the Ford Fiesta, Ford allowed a number of social media influencers to drive the Fiesta and share their experiences online. The videos and blogs were posted in real time, with no editing or filtering by Ford. The confidence Ford had in its product resulted in a great deal of success on social media. The campaign resulted in nearly a hundred and fifty thousand requests for more information about the new car. What’s more, more than 80% of those asking to find out more were new Ford customers!

Lesson: If you have a good product, let your influencers tell your social community about it.

Commit to Your Social Media Presence

Running a successful campaign is great, but your social media presence cannot be relegated only to when an official campaign is underway. In order to find success on social media, you need to be committed to your program. Ford created a hub wherein Ford users could engage with the brand in real time. This phenomenon is referred to as social care, and it is a social form of customer service that nearly a third of social media users prefer to conventional customer service options (i.e. phone).

Lesson: Make a point to stay active on social media, because Ford has shown that consistency pays off.

Integrate Every Form of Media

Disjointed campaigns will result in confusion for your audience. Different channels and department working on different campaigns and promotions will mean a diluted audience responding to a multitude of campaigns as opposed to a convergence on one major one.

For Ford, they approached their 2010 Explorer campaign this way, integrating every form of media in order to drive the most traffic at the launch. The result? The day of the launch they received 100 million social impressions and 400 million browser impressions.

Lesson: Integrate all of your media under one roof to drive every potential lead to the same place.

Build a Personality for Your Brand on Social Media

As much as people might like a brand, they want to engage with something more. Your audience wants to engage with a personality. For Ford, this realization came when they were looking to rebrand the Focus. So, how did they create a personality? They created a sock puppet mascot named Doug. The goal was to engage with a younger audience and find a new customer-base for the rebranded Focus. The results were impressive, and Ford saw a spike in interest in the Focus with a 61% consideration rate. Not bad considering most people tried to avoid the Focus even as a rental prior to this rebranding.

Lesson: Build a personality for your brand and engage on a human level with your audience.

Find Your Audience Where They Are Talking

One crucial element that marketers often forget is that they need to be going out and finding their audience where they are as opposed to waiting for their audience to find them. Ford realized this and took action. When building a program last year, Ford created a video and distributed it among every one of their followers most popular networks. The results were quite successful, with the video receiving over 1.5 million hits.

Lesson: Find your audience and engage with them where they are, and not the other way around.

How can you apply some of these lessons to your social media strategies? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!