They don’t come much more old-economy than General Motors – if you asked for a large American corporation from Central Casting, GM is who they’d send you. But surprising things are happening at GM – they’re getting into blogging in a big way.
GMBlogs is where you’ll find Vice Chairmen, Group Vice Presidents and other assorted individuals with the keys to the executive washroom posting on topics as varied as branding, fuel economy and auto design. And it’s not just a token gesture from a marcomms function – these are real people, there are real comments and trackbacks, and if you browse through the comments, you’ll find real debate.
There are several things which I think are worthy of note here:
They’re playing by the rules
Despite being a big corporate – presumably with all the brand police baggage that comes along with being a big corporate – GM are taking this seriously. They’re explicitly signing up to Charlene Li’s blogging policy guidelines and appear to be sticking to the script. A recent posting on fuel economy prompted a furious debate about GM’s record in this area (which sucks, from a European’s perspective), but the negative comments are still there. There must have been a great deal of temptation on the part of the marketing wonks to control this and delete them, but to GM’s credit they didn’t.
They’ll be learning from this
The feedback they’ll be getting from these comments – if it’s taken on board – could give a valuable, and potentially unique insight into their customers’ attitudes. No amount of market research and focus-grouping are going to uncover this kind of feedback – so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if GM are monitoring it very closely and using it alongside more established market research methods.
They’re pushing the envelope.
It’s not stopping with blogs – yesterday the first GM podcast was posted. This is a big deal – podcasting is bleeding-edge personified. It’s something that most geeks haven’t heard about yet, so to see a corporate behemoth the size of GM getting on board at this stage of a new technology is unheard of. And quite apart from the marketing kudos of doing something like this, there are going to be other, longer term and less-tangible spinoff benefits. If GM are podcasting, what does that say for their corporate culture? Perhaps they’re not quite as staid and conservative on the inside as you’d expect them to be? Will that help them to attract the kind of creative and entrepreneurial people they’re going to need to survive in the future? It can’t hurt.
