General Motors: Understanding social networks

A simple suggestion encourages users of photo- and video-sharing sites to post to a company blog.

The Site

General Motors, the US-based vehicle maker, has two main blogs: FastLane and FYI. While FastLane is largely a forum for Vice-chairman Bob Lutz to discuss issues and products, FYI favours motor-related photographs and videos. Some of these are produced in-house but many – particularly photographs – have been posted by enthusiasts either on Flickr, the photo-sharing site, or YouTube, the video site.

The blog’s editor encourages more such contributions by saying that ‘”if you’d like to see your YouTube clip featured as our video of the week, tag it ‘gmfyi’ on YouTube and we’ll find it”. Or, for photographs, ‘”if you would like to recommend your favorite photo with a GM car or truck in it, put it up on Flickr and tag it with ‘gmfyi’”.

The Takeaway

General Motors may currently be strike-prone but is ahead of most corporates in taking to the ‘social networking’ world and has already established a good audience for its two blogs. Part of its success must come from its thorough understanding of how the new world works. Networking sites Flickr and YouTube allow users to upload photographs or videos, and tag them with searchable terms. All FYI’s blog editor has to do is to run a search regularly and pick the best offerings. Does it work? With photographs, triumphantly. A search for ‘gmfyi’ on Flickr shows 2,186 matches. YouTube has 20 matches, which reflects the much lower availability of video clips.

GM is achieving a multiple whammy. It is populating its site with good content at minimum effort. It is making its site more popular, not least because of the links from Flickr (which in turn will help it up the search rankings). And it is handing ‘power’ to the users – or at least it appears to be. The fact that it has so many photographs to choose from shows that it still has a huge amount of control over its content.

First published on 25 September, 2007