Online Marketing Blog

When you think of successful consumer brands in the social media space, names like Dell, Zappos and Pepsi come to mind. Another is Ford. Last year the Ford Fiesta movement generated a tremendous amount of awareness (and pre-orders) for a vehicle that wasn’t available to the public yet. (Great summary on Jeff Bullas’s blog) At the same time, it inspired a community to engage, create content and continue discussions about the Fiesta with over 7 million video views.

While in Dearborn, I visited The Henry Ford Museum, The Rouge Truck Factory and had an invitation to visit Ford’s Head of Social Media, Scott Monty at Ford’s World Headquarters where we did a short interview. We’ve talked to Scott and live blogged about Ford social media efforts in the past, but in this interview he talked about the place for social media with Ford’s new product lines, local social media work with Chapter 2 of the Fiesta movement and advice for companies on empowering communities.

Kudos to MIMA for getting Ford’s Scott Monty to do a session at the MIMA Summit, “Social Media at a Fortune 10 Company”.  Scott will be keynoting the DMA International conference in San Diego with Martha Stewart later this month (10,000 attendees) and MIMA was able to get him to do a breakout session.

The story telling trend of MIMA Summit continued with Scott Monty talking about “TheFordStory.com” a site that evolved out of the “carpocalypse” situation surrounding the automotive industry’s financial situation as well as his own story about getting involved with Ford.

77% of people in the US trust companies less than last year. Edelman Trust Barometer.

Ford has about 95% recognition rate worldwide, but when Scott began with Ford, he had no connection with it. A decision was made to do more to “humanize” the brand.

Blogs are undoubtedly a big part of the social media world and that’s why the topic of social media was approached at Blog World Expo from many different angles from monetization and marketing to social media and blogs in corporate public relations.

This interview with Ford’s head of social media, Scott Monty touches on a few things large companies (or any size company for that matter) should be thinking about when evaluating social media as a communications, marketing and community building channel.

You can read plenty more of Scott Monty’s insights on his blog, The Social Media Marketing Blog and on Twitter at @scottmonty.