Lessons to learn from Ford's Facebook car launch

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 | By Charlotte McEleny

Although Ford is already known for being a brand with a lot of experience in social media (its head of social media Scott Monty has more than 50,000 followers on Twitter), it’s continuing this by being the first brand to reveal a car on social media, rather than choosing the traditional car show (nma.co.uk 27 July 2010).

Helped by the lure of a competition to win one of the cars, and the fact that there would have been anticipation already around a new Explorer, the car has accrued more than 53,000 Facebook fans. Yet while the launch may work for an established name like the Explorer, which is already well known to US drivers, a pure social media launch won’t work for any brand. The real challenge is learning how to integrate social media effectively with more appropriate channels.

Social media could be a great space to launch a product as buzz can build and spread quickly, but not many brands have used it. This is because in social media, without a big media budget, it can take time to build up an audience ahead of a product launch.

Social is still a comparably young channel and it certainly doesn’t match up to others in terms of spend. As a result, we tend to place a lot of emphasis on what it can do for a company. This is needed to highlight to the many who are still unconvinced, but sometimes we need to be realistic and admit when other channels would work better.

This was also illustrated by the recent financial results from Domino’s Pizza, which attributed a 61.4% increase in online sales to its online activity (nma.co.uk 12 July 2010). The contribution from social media has been grossly overplayed in the results, and the contribution from affiliate and search downplayed by the media and the industry. Instead, we should have praised Domino’s for showing brands how to integrate all their channels and produce a really impressive effect on the company’s bottom line.

Brands should be following Ford and taking a gamble, as it could, and should, pay off if executed correctly. But let’s face it, launching a life insurance product on Facebook is hardly likely to gather the wider attention that the likes of a car will get. In this case, social needs to step back from the limelight and become part of the mix instead.

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