Ford CMO: 37% Awareness Level for Fiesta Thanks to Social Media
“Ford’s Chief Marketing Executive James Farley says the company has made a bigger digital and social media bet than rivals because, “If you are trying to communicate, as we are, that you have been reinventing the company , you can’t just say it. You have to get the people to say it to each other.”
Perhaps Ford’s biggest single bet on digital and social media has been the Fiesta Movement, a program that began in 2008, 18 months before the cars will actually arrive in dealerships.
Ford gave 100 European Fiestas to people to drive and live with. The results of the blogging, Facebooking, YouTubing and Tweeting by those people, plus the echoing of those messages by the blogosphere, followers, etc. has been an eye opener.
Consider this: The awareness level of Fiesta, a car that is not even in the U.S. yet (though it has been a fixture in Europe for years), is 37% among Generation Y…
That is about equal to the awareness level of Fusion and Flex, models that have received hundreds of millions of dollars in traditional media spend.”
Source: Business Week – Ford Spending 25% of Marketing on Digital and Social Media
The New Definition Of Usability (WordPress 2.7 Unleashed)
Lost for words… This has to be the single-most intuitive design overhaul that I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing on a screen, EVER. Period.
And what boggles the mind even more, is that this wasn’t a solo effort by the development team, but a joint-Crowd Sourced process with an astounding product-upgrade as a result.
Check out the short video below, outlining the latest improvements to WordPress, or download it here.
Upon stumbling on this screencast on ReadWriteWeb 5 minutes ago, immediately upgraded to WordPress 2.7, updated the database and… was plainly and simply blown away by not just the changes and tweaks in navigation & look-and-feel, but even more so by the plain flexibility of the dashboard; from this day onwards, I -the user- am in FULL control of each and every aspect of my own navigation/experience…
More often than not, we digerati/Tech pro’s tend to complain and outline major and minor faults with web-apps/IT environments (much to the chagrin of the development team behind it, alas that’s part of the job, innit…) so I really believe it’s only fair to take a deep bow when something comes along that does manage to tick every box and give credit to a team whom wouldn’t just settle for following every rule in the UDX rulebook, but decided to move those goalposts, in one fell swoop, to the level above and beyond the next level all together and set a new industry-wide benchmark…
So, again, hat tip to the WordPress Community/developers, for I can’t remember the last time that I’ve been as deeply impressed with a web-app or upgrade as not only a web professional but as an end-user as well (and judging by the techmeme/resonating echoes in the blogosphere this approval seems to be universal!)
“Code Is Poetry”
and all hope is not lost yet indeed ;)
