I’ve mentioned GM and their blogs a couple of times in the last week or so – now there’s another first from them. The Director of New Media from GM Communications has been interviewed for a podcast, conducted over Skype. How’s that for innovative?
It’s an interesting insight into how GM have gone about using blogs as part of their communications strategy, but there are a couple of exchanges in particular which are worth seeing / hearing:
Neville: Who are the commenters? customers, employees, dealers? Are you happy and pleased with the spread of commenting?Michael: I was completely blown away by the level of comments and the thought that goes into those comments. We didn’t know what to expect and in many cases you feel that people have been waiting for years and years to be able to vent their feelings to General Motors, so even the negative ones aren’t sniping, they’re just giving us their sincere feelings and thoughts on what we can do to create better products. We’re appreciating most of them!
There are no shortage of ‘company X sucks’ sites around on the web – and it struck me that providing a comments forum as part of a corporate blog could well be a way of short-circuiting that. If you’ve got a forum on which to vent your spleen – and you can pretty much guarantee that someone in the organisation is going to see what you write – the incentive to create or contribute to an independent ‘anti’ site may be reduced.
Shel: Was there any resistance from your legal staff when the concept was first proposed?Michael: They had some concerns, but since its Bob Lutz primarily, and at an elevated level in the company, they had confidence that we wouldn’t do anything that would be a problem.
This definitely fits with our experience – you’ve got to have a salesman. If there was a comment that sums up the decision making process in large organisations, this is it. It’ll be interesting to see if GM’s lead is something that other corporates will follow.
