Did Ford blog their way to a $1 million profit?
Ford Motor Company, who recruited 100 bloggers for its Fiesta Movement social media initiative in March has posted a 5% increase in year on year car sales for Q3, representing a 2.2% increase in U.S. marketshare.
While the bankruptcies of GM & Chrysler and the government’s trade in initiative ‘Cash for Clunkers’ no doubt had an effect, Ford’s bold social media initiative has been a runaway success with figures last month showing 4.3 million YouTube views, 500,000+ Flickr views, 3 million+ Twitter impressions and 50,000 interested potential customers, 97% of which don’t own a Ford currently.
Speaking at Blogworld & New Media Expo in October, Scott Monty, Ford’s multimedia communications manager said ”Companies that don’t acknowledge and engage in this new social More »
Whatever your politics, the release of a behind the scenes video showing David Cameron and William Haig chatting about putting together his keynote speech today is an impressive demonstration of how You Tube can work in party politics if the content is right.
The US Federal Trade Commission has released new guidelines which will force bloggers to disclose any commercial interest they have in products they promote. In the first update to its endorsement guidelines in 30 years, the FTC’s move is seen as an attempt to bring the blogosphere into line with endorsement codes long followed by broadcast stations, newspapers and magazines.
Andy Bond, Chief Executive of Asda outlined his new vision for a “transparent” business yesterday, “run for the consumer by the consumer” including web cams of the farms where Asda’s milk and carrots come from and a team of bloggers recruited to tell shoppers about the business, rather than “a bunch of PR consultants” said Bond.
I truly think Scots are taking over the world, they’re everywhere. Gordon Brown, Susan Boyle, my girlfriend, the plumber yesterday and then of course there’s Mashable, the incrediably successful social media guide with 1.5 million twitter followers and 254,000 RSS feeds - made in Scotland, from servers.
Interesting to read that in these difficult times for motor manufacturers, Toyota has focussed on social media for the launch of the new prius campaign, ‘putting the blog at the heart of the campaign’ according to 
Tomorrow, I’m off to Provence to contemplate my navel, rather than this blog for a week but meanwhile, I leave you with 
Hitting The Checkout, a survey from ecommerce solution provide Dotcommerce, assessed 20 of the UK’s leading UK retailers and found that, while most have the basics of ecommerce covered, the majority are failing to embrace added-alue content such as blogs, vidoes, user-generated content or social media links.
