However, the highlight of this conference was the panel discussion immediately following mine, named "Engaged Markets: Social Media" facilitated by Pete Blackshaw and Max Kalehoff of Neilsen BuzzMetrics.  Their panelists included Michael Wiley from General Motors and Curt Hecht from GM Planworks.  Michael is the Director of New Media at GM Communications and is responsible for launching the GM FastLane Blog, where Bob Lutz, GM's Vice Chairman, regularly blogs and gives GM a "more human feel".  Curt Hecht is Executive Vice President at GM Planworks, which handles all buying and planning for GM's more than $3 billion annual spend in advertising.

This blog post by Dan Farber at ZDNet does a great job of summarizing the highlights of the panel discussion.  I blogged about GM in April, hypothesizing that a revolutionary in their approach to advertising may be underway.  After hearing Michael and Curt talk, I am now confident that my hypothesis is more concrete.  These guys really get it.  Here are some of my favorite quotes from the panel (from the blog by Dan Farber):

• In the context of the social media explosion, Michael Wiley, GM director of new media, didn't hold back. "The existing ad paradigm sucks, it's woefully inefficient. It takes huge dollars to create ads on TV that run for 30 or 60 seconds and give the consumer virtually no information," Wiley said. "The opportunity is to create relatively grassroots ads, six to eight minutes long that give an in-depth brand experience and are released online."
• "Instead of GM producing ads online, we could use testimonials in existing online content as our advertising vehicles moving forward," [Michael Wiley] added.  "Why not serve those up instead of a contrived advertisement." 
• Wiley also said a secret to GM's success is listening to conversations, including the negative comments. GM has blogs and comments on posts [that] frequently bash and criticize the company's products. "You need to be open to criticism and willing to [engage] detractors," Wiley said. "Businesses like GM need to fundamentally change the way they operate. Customer engagement and every customer's opinion counts is just beginning. For years and years you could keep the squeaky wheel happy…now they can talk to a millions of people. The process to change the way business is done is slow process…and still mostly old way of doing business that has been around for 40 years."
• …the voice could be larger than the Wall Street Journal [in influencing purchase decisions]. We just need to find the brand advocates," [Curt Hecht said].
• "We will continue to see the existing power structure subverted," Wiley said. "It's a period of upheaval, and I am confident it will just get better over the next few years," Wiley concluded.

Michael also talked about the effectiveness of their "Google Pontaic" campaign as well as their campaign to point shoppers to Edmunds to compare Chevrolet's features versus competitive models.  The goal here is to say to potential customers, "we know you don't trust us and consider us a stodgy old-world company – so here is some third party credibility that is easy for you to find and mostly consumer-generated" (that's my not so great paraphase, not his actual words).

It was also very interesting to see Ed Keller's groundbreaking research on the word of mouth "all-stars" (the most talked about brands in America in a net positive context).  Chevrolet was #5 on the list.  No other domestic car company was on the top-ten list.  GM is doing something right.

If this doesn't make the authors of "The Cluetrain Manifesto" smile, I'm not sure what would.  Actually, one of them was in the audience and I publicly thanked him for inadvertently helping me come up with the name for our company.  Unfortunately, I didn't see him smile back at me.  Maybe it was my comment about most domain names being taken!

Happy 4th of July and God bless America!     

- from "The History of Great American Turnarounds", 2929 Entertainment, aired on Jan. 5, 2025

This is probably old news to some of you, but I find it fascinating that Chevrolet is allowing consumers to create their own ads for the new Tahoe.  As you can imagine, some consumers have created some very critical ads.  However, I applaud General Motors for finally taking some risk.  I'm sure the authors of "The Cluetrain Manifesto" would also applaud this bold move.

There is no doubt in my mind that we will see more of this.  This is the start of an open and honest dialogue between General Motors and their customers.  Is the dialogue always going to positive?  Of course not.  It isn't always positive offline, but it is too easy for General Motors to ignore private customer-to-customer conversations.  It is a bit different when the conversations are out in the open, staring them in the face.

Sam Decker calls this "customer oxygen".  No matter what you call it, it is healthy.  I have long believed that a company should design its products with customers.  That may sound obvious, but it's not.  I created Coremetrics, a successful Web analytics business, based on the premise that companies like Accrue and NetGenesis had failed to do this.  And their customers defected quickly.

Then I read Ron Bloom's, the CEO of Podshow, article on "advertising 2.0".  Outside of the fact that there are too many 2.0 terms, I agree with Ron that advertising must evolve.  We are more cynical than ever about advertising because we are more educated.  If you are reading this blog, you are likely far more educated about marketing than most consumers.  And you are probably much more likely than most consumers to ignore advertising altogether – skip it with your TIVO, read news online via an RSS feed, get the straight scoop from your friends.  The question is – what form of marketing works or is going to work on you?  Is it "keeping up with The Joneses" all over again?  Only this time, you actually trust "The Joneses" more than you trust any corporation.

Every social networking, blogging, user-generated content, "authentic media", and Web 2.0 company has a common goal in mind: monetize their business model with advertising.  There are a ton of venture-capital and public-market dollars chasing this aim.  My bet is that several will evolve entirely new forms of advertising.  For some, the bets are already paying off.  Last I heard, Facebook is making over $10 million per month on advertising and the buzz is that it may be acquired for as much as $2 billion.  And you probably heard what Rupert Murdoch's #2 is publically saying about their acquisition of MySpace, "MySpace is the single biggest growth opportunity this company has".  Considering the Murdoch empire and the newness of social networking, that is a pretty mind-blowing statement.

In full disclosure, my wife, Debra, just bought a new GM SUV after trading in her Volkswagen SUV, an unfortunate lemon of lemons (it actually pains me to write that after many years of loyalty to Volkswagen).  I also bring this up because I found myself genuinely impressed with the 2007 redesign of the model she bought, and I wonder if Bob Lutz and his team are really starting to figure it out by listening.  It is the first American car that we have ever bought.  Imagine how odd it would be to read that statement if we lived in the 1950's instead of the 2000's.