Can social media save the American auto industry?

No, probably not. But a well-mounted social campaign may be able to establish a U.S. brand identity—among a targeted youth audience– for a European-designed and -made car that’s already a hit overseas. And for auto maker Ford, that will be good enough.

The campaign is being mobilized on behalf of the Fiesta, a “supermini” subcompact that Ford began building in Germany back in 1976. They’ve sold 10 million overseas in the last thirty years, but the little car didn’t seem to be a fit for the domestic driver.

But that was before gas neared four dollars a gallon last summer, and also before the response to the Honda Fit, Nissan’s Versa, Toyota’s Yaris and the Mini Cooper seemed to prove that Americans would respond to small cars that sipped gas and caught the downsized zeitgeist.

Ford now plans to begin delivering Fiestas to dealerships in the summer of 2010, and in preparation the company wants to build some buzz around the brand with the young, cash-strapped Millennial crowd who will be its most likely buyers.

To do that, the company ran a social-media contest to recruit 100 U.S.-based “agents” to drive the first Fiestas in the U.S., shipped straight from the German assembly plant. (Once the brand is up and running, U.S. Fiestas will be made in Mexico.) These agents will use the cars for six months, each one taking his or her ride on self-initiated monthly “missions” and posting the record of their travels to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr, as well as to the Fiesta Movement microsite.

The company recruited these agents by asking them to submit videos to YouTube explaining why they should be chosen and then getting their friends and connections to vote for them. More than 4,000 applications, earning more than 640,000 views, came in to the video site by the March 13 deadline, and the judges selected their 100 picks earlier this month.

Dubbed the “Fiesta Movement”, the campaign had its origins last year in some blue-sky thinking, according to Sam de la Garza, Ford’s small car marketing manager. “The whole thing was kicked off last summer when [Ford North American marketing group vice president] Jim Farley asked, ‘Sam, what would you do if you could bring over a thousand cars?’ I had our small-car group start to brainstorm some ideas. Then we handed the idea off to our experiential team, and they worked in close conjunction with our agency, J Walter Thompson Detroit, to end up formulating the Fiesta Movement concept.”

Government agencies played a part in the campaign strategizing too. Since the Fiestas being brought over were built in Germany, they were designed to meet the crash-test specifications and emissions standards set by the European Union, different from those in this country. That meant securing special clearances for 150 cars from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (The Fiestas to be sold in the U.S. will be made at a plant in Mexico and will meet American standards.)

“We made a few modifications to the cars we brought over,” de la Garza adds. “For instance, we changed the speedometers from kilometers to miles. We also switched the readouts on the radios from German to English. Other than that, what you see is what we brought.”

So much for the cars themselves. As for the applicants, de la Garza says they were first filtered through a set of relatively hard criteria: their connectedness to the social Web, with presences on Facebook and MySpace, YouTube hits, Twitter followers, etc.

“It was basically an online application asking, are you active in these spaces?” he says. “Once we got that established, we asked them to put that social network to work and demonstrate that they could use it to get a message across.” Applicants had to create a video, upload it to YouTube, and then mobilize their social contacts to rack up the largest number of views and votes. Here’s one of the deserving winners:



But Ford wasn’t only looking for the biggest vote-getters.

“We analyzed the submissions to see if they were reaching enough people,” de la Garza says. “We also got into some subjective criteria: Was it catchy? Do you have a stage presence? Can you tell a story in four minutes or less?” The campaign’s digital agency, Undercurrent, will work with those agents whose submissions showed particular creative flair but who may be lacking in specific social-media skills.

Once the monthly Fiesta missions get underway starting in May, agents will be given a theme and then work with Ford to customize the mission details to their situations. An agent in El Paso TX, for example, might want to take a road trip to Austin, while someone from South Dakota might choose to tour the Badlands.

Those official mission records—either in video or in photographs—are the only part of the agents’ output that Ford will actively manage and consult upon. But for all the collateral social-network chatter, much of which will be linked to on that microsite, the agents are strictly on their own.

“We know we can’t control what they write on Twitter, Facebook or their own individual blogs,” de la Garza says. “This is a program totally committed to staying completely authentic.” The day he spoke to Promo Interactive, agents in New York and Los Angeles had just received their cars and were getting some basic racetrack training in their handling. But agents had begun posting content from their hotel rooms the night before, and while we spoke, Twitter traffic was flying, with East Coast agents flaunting their time advantage over their West Coast counterparts: three extra hours with their new Fiestas.

At interview time, Ford had not finished strategizing the metrics it will watch over the coming months to gauge the campaign’s progress. “We’re working with Undercurrent and our digital teams to benchmark where we were a couple of weeks ago and then we’ll start the weekly or monthly cadence of certain metrics.

The company has not decided either whether it’s more interested in charting the viral reach of this effort or in tracking sign-ups for test drives—something the Web site will be set up to handle later in the year. “It’s a real balancing act,” de la Garza says. “Right now we’re so early into this and on the cutting edge, even internally to Ford, that right now we’re watching it all. We want to track it, but at the same time, on the brand side, we have to be patient. We’re trying to get everybody to look at the full picture as much as possible.”

An interesting comparison to the Fiesta Movement social campaign is the user-generated content being generated by the company’s Mustang division in its current “10 Unleashed” initiative. There fans of the car line are being asked for their memories and dreams associated with a well-known nameplate; here, a small group of early adopters are being asked to plant the seeds of stories, and also to provide real-time consumer feedback to Ford.

“The Mustang campaign is really a one-way dialogue: Tell me a story,” de la Garza says. “With Fiesta, we’ve raised that to a higher level: Tell us a story, and we’ll act on it and get other people commenting. I’ve already got 50 agents sending me comments on my Twitter account.”

That feedback element might just be the most powerful portion of the campaign for Ford’s product development purposes. The company hasn’t sold a small subcompact, known as a B-segment car, in many years.

“We have to recalibrate ourselves around the competition from Honda and Toyota to decide if we have a competitive car here,” de la Garza says. “A lot of the people driving these cars as our agents are competitive owners driving Honda Elements and Volkswagens. They’re not Ford loyalists. Now we’re about to get monthly feedback both on the mechanics of the car and on the performance and design elements. That’s awesome for us.”

Can social media save the American auto industry?

No, probably not. But a well-mounted social campaign may be able to establish a U.S. brand identity—among a targeted youth audience– for a European-designed and -made car that’s already a hit overseas. And for auto maker Ford, that will be good enough.

The campaign is being mobilized on behalf of the Fiesta, a “supermini” subcompact that Ford began building in Germany back in 1976. They’ve sold 10 million overseas in the last thirty years, but the little car didn’t seem to be a fit for the domestic driver.

But that was before gas neared four dollars a gallon last summer, and also before the response to the Honda Fit, Nissan’s Versa, Toyota’s Yaris and the Mini Cooper seemed to prove that Americans would respond to small cars that sipped gas and caught the downsized zeitgeist.

Ford now plans to begin delivering Fiestas to dealerships in the summer of 2010, and in preparation the company wants to build some buzz around the brand with the young, cash-strapped Millennial crowd who will be its most likely buyers.

To do that, the company ran a social-media contest to recruit 100 U.S.-based “agents” to drive the first Fiestas in the U.S., shipped straight from the German assembly plant. (Once the brand is up and running, U.S. Fiestas will be made in Mexico.) These agents will use the cars for six months, each one taking his or her ride on self-initiated monthly “missions” and posting the record of their travels to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr, as well as to the Fiesta Movement microsite.

The company recruited these agents by asking them to submit videos to YouTube explaining why they should be chosen and then getting their friends and connections to vote for them. More than 4,000 applications, earning more than 640,000 views, came in to the video site by the March 13 deadline, and the judges selected their 100 picks earlier this month.

Dubbed the “Fiesta Movement”, the campaign had its origins last year in some blue-sky thinking, according to Sam de la Garza, Ford’s small car marketing manager. “The whole thing was kicked off last summer when [Ford North American marketing group vice president] Jim Farley asked, ‘Sam, what would you do if you could bring over a thousand cars?’ I had our small-car group start to brainstorm some ideas. Then we handed the idea off to our experiential team, and they worked in close conjunction with our agency, J Walter Thompson Detroit, to end up formulating the Fiesta Movement concept.”

Government agencies played a part in the campaign strategizing too. Since the Fiestas being brought over were built in Germany, they were designed to meet the crash-test specifications and emissions standards set by the European Union, different from those in this country. That meant securing special clearances for 150 cars from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (The Fiestas to be sold in the U.S. will be made at a plant in Mexico and will meet American standards.)

“We made a few modifications to the cars we brought over,” de la Garza adds. “For instance, we changed the speedometers from kilometers to miles. We also switched the readouts on the radios from German to English. Other than that, what you see is what we brought.”

So much for the cars themselves. As for the applicants, de la Garza says they were first filtered through a set of relatively hard criteria: their connectedness to the social Web, with presences on Facebook and MySpace, YouTube hits, Twitter followers, etc.

“It was basically an online application asking, are you active in these spaces?” he says. “Once we got that established, we asked them to put that social network to work and demonstrate that they could use it to get a message across.” Applicants had to create a video, upload it to YouTube, and then mobilize their social contacts to rack up the largest number of views and votes. Here’s one of the deserving winners:



But Ford wasn’t only looking for the biggest vote-getters.

“We analyzed the submissions to see if they were reaching enough people,” de la Garza says. “We also got into some subjective criteria: Was it catchy? Do you have a stage presence? Can you tell a story in four minutes or less?” The campaign’s digital agency, Undercurrent, will work with those agents whose submissions showed particular creative flair but who may be lacking in specific social-media skills.

Once the monthly Fiesta missions get underway starting in May, agents will be given a theme and then work with Ford to customize the mission details to their situations. An agent in El Paso TX, for example, might want to take a road trip to Austin, while someone from South Dakota might choose to tour the Badlands.

Those official mission records—either in video or in photographs—are the only part of the agents’ output that Ford will actively manage and consult upon. But for all the collateral social-network chatter, much of which will be linked to on that microsite, the agents are strictly on their own.

“We know we can’t control what they write on Twitter, Facebook or their own individual blogs,” de la Garza says. “This is a program totally committed to staying completely authentic.” The day he spoke to Promo Interactive, agents in New York and Los Angeles had just received their cars and were getting some basic racetrack training in their handling. But agents had begun posting content from their hotel rooms the night before, and while we spoke, Twitter traffic was flying, with East Coast agents flaunting their time advantage over their West Coast counterparts: three extra hours with their new Fiestas.

At interview time, Ford had not finished strategizing the metrics it will watch over the coming months to gauge the campaign’s progress. “We’re working with Undercurrent and our digital teams to benchmark where we were a couple of weeks ago and then we’ll start the weekly or monthly cadence of certain metrics.

The company has not decided either whether it’s more interested in charting the viral reach of this effort or in tracking sign-ups for test drives—something the Web site will be set up to handle later in the year. “It’s a real balancing act,” de la Garza says. “Right now we’re so early into this and on the cutting edge, even internally to Ford, that right now we’re watching it all. We want to track it, but at the same time, on the brand side, we have to be patient. We’re trying to get everybody to look at the full picture as much as possible.”

An interesting comparison to the Fiesta Movement social campaign is the user-generated content being generated by the company’s Mustang division in its current “10 Unleashed” initiative. There fans of the car line are being asked for their memories and dreams associated with a well-known nameplate; here, a small group of early adopters are being asked to plant the seeds of stories, and also to provide real-time consumer feedback to Ford.

“The Mustang campaign is really a one-way dialogue: Tell me a story,” de la Garza says. “With Fiesta, we’ve raised that to a higher level: Tell us a story, and we’ll act on it and get other people commenting. I’ve already got 50 agents sending me comments on my Twitter account.”

That feedback element might just be the most powerful portion of the campaign for Ford’s product development purposes. The company hasn’t sold a small subcompact, known as a B-segment car, in many years.

“We have to recalibrate ourselves around the competition from Honda and Toyota to decide if we have a competitive car here,” de la Garza says. “A lot of the people driving these cars as our agents are competitive owners driving Honda Elements and Volkswagens. They’re not Ford loyalists. Now we’re about to get monthly feedback both on the mechanics of the car and on the performance and design elements. That’s awesome for us.”