The Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex is under attack by roving gangs of illegal street racers.

Okay that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but illegal street racing is a big safety concern for residents and a serious danger to drivers and their fans.

In hopes of curtailing illegal street racing, Scion Events has kicked off the second season of the Scion Drag-n-Brag, where racers are pulled off the streets and thrown into the relative safety of the Texas Motor Speedway.

Texas Motor Speedway is cutting their 1.5 mile track down to an 1/8 mile drag strip for the six week competition. Sadly last week’s opener was rained out, but everything is on schedule for tomorrow’s races and the next five weeks.

In order to connect with racing enthusiasts we’ve built out custom pages across a wide spectrum of sites.

We have a YouTube page with videos from the races.

We created a Tumblr blog with updates and information on the races.

There’s also an ever-growing Flickr photo archive with race pics and some shots from the Show-n-Shine competition, a weekly complement to the Drag-n-Brag races where car owners can compete on looks alone.

And then there’s a special tab on eight dealer’s Facebook pages providing real-time updates from each of the above networks. All of this furnished within Facebook.

Utilizing so many networks makes this a truly social campaign. There’s a little bit of everything for everyone allowing us to bring racers from all walks of life to the track.

The social awareness aspect of the races is of the greatest benefit. Last year’s Drag-n-Brag allowed dozens of racers the opportunity to showcase their skills under controlled  supervision at the Texas Motor Speedway.

We’ll be watching to see how it spreads across the Dallas/Fort Worth market.

]]> http://www.goso.com/blog/2010/07/scions-drag-n-brag-lets-street-racers-compete-in-safety-2/feed/ 2 http://www.goso.com/blog/2010/07/social-media-summit-weathering-a-recall-storm-with-digg/ http://www.goso.com/blog/2010/07/social-media-summit-weathering-a-recall-storm-with-digg/#comments Thu, 08 Jul 2010 19:05:07 +0000 Ryan Riley http://www.goso.com/blog/?p=785

Scott DeYager, Social Media Manager at Toyota Motor Sales, spoke at the Thought Leadership Summit last month where he shared some of Toyota’s social media successes during their recall. Most would consider a recall to be a public relations nightmare, but Toyota survived, thanks in part to their social media savvy on Facebook, Twitter and the unexpected Digg Dialogg.

“It’s what I like to call a crowd-sourced interview,” said Scott DeYager describing the Digg Dialogg platform.

Digg Dialogg was born from Digg.com as a way to give communities access to industry leaders. Whether it be in the arts, government or the business industry. Toyota had been approached by Digg to participate in a live interview on the Dialogg platform.

“It was a golden opportunity to be transparent and to humanize the brand when we desperately needed it,” DeYager said.

The Digg community was given three days to ask any question of Jim Lentz, President/COO of Toyota Motor Sales, USA, and over the course of the three days use Digg’s thumbs up/thumbs down functionality to move questions up or down. At the end of the three days the ten questions with the most Diggs would be posed to Lentz in a live interview two hours after the questions closed.

“When the questions closed I was actually shocked to see that Jim Lentz had received over 1,400 questions. More than Timothy Geithner and a few less than Al Gore during his Digg Dialogg,” DeYager said.

Toyota’s Dialogg was the first over a topical news item. Other Dialoggs were of celebrities and politicians like Peter Jackson, Grant Hill, and President Bill Clinton.

“This was one of those moments, as a company, that you have to give up control to be in control. I’ll be honest, not everyone in the company was confident with what we were about to do, but the results speak for themselves,” DeYager said.

Surprisingly, six of the top ten questions had nothing to do with the recall. The number one question was: What do you drive? And the simple answer is Lentz drives a Lexus RX Hybrid.

In the next five days the interview received over 1 million views.

Two weeks ago, GOSO’s parent company, Boalt Interactive Agency hosted a summer mixer to show appreciation to employees, clients, and friends for their contribution to GOSO’s continued success. Held on a DC roof deck with views of the Potomac River, the GOSO team mingled, boogied, and feasted on an array of delectable delights and refreshing summer libations. And, to use a word that the young folks like, the party was EPIC.

Reggae rhythms hummed through the air as our steel drum band provided a set of fun tunes. Did I mention they took requests and allowed me to sing a verse or two on the mic! The open bar kept spirits quite high and the conversation interesting. Even the weather decided to cooperate, providing clear skies & balmy breezes, instead of stifling with DC’s typical humidity. It was the perfect venue!

The real treat of the evening was the exceedingly awesome batch of people that attended. Although we interact with our clients and co-workers on a daily basis, it was refreshing to get to know everyone on a more personal level. Sichon & Adam found that not all energy drinks are created equal. I reaffirmed my inability to dance. And, Liz, Herb, and Daniel discussed sports as a metaphor for life (or something equally philosophical and highbrow). One of our local clients, Sean Magaha of DARCARS, stopped in & regaled us with tales of dealership life.

Get on our good side and we’ll be sure to invite to you to our next mixer. We would love to go social with you!

Jon Munzel founded Thought Leadership Summits (TLS) six years ago with the first Automotive Customer Centricity Summit. Summits are designed to enable executives to have high quality interactions with their true peers.  With his background in the automotive industry, Munzel quickly recognized the need for a summit addressing relationships between OEMs, Dealers, Captive Finance providers and their shared customers.

Since the beginning the Summit has addressed important strategic issues within the automotive industry such as OEM and Dealer CRM, lead management, collaborative marketing, point of sale customization, and customer lifecycle management.

“I started the summits after attending a lot of events that had little value due to their large scale and lack of quality – both from a content and participation aspect.  So my goal was to develop and execute summits that delivered value by creating an intimate environment where senior level executives are able to make true connections with one another, discussing their shared challenges and successes,” Munzel said.

This June marked Thought Leadership Summits’ first foray into the growing discussion of social media in the automotive industry.  A new Automotive Social Media Summit was held immediately following the existing Automotive Customer Centricity Summit, creating an Automotive Summit Series covering all channels of customer interaction.

Presentations included speakers from American Honda, Auction Direct USA, AutoNation, Bob Baker Enterprises, Facebook, Ford, Toyota, and Volvo. GOSO founder Adam Boalt was also in attendance, and acted as Chair of the Summit.

“After the 2009 Automotive Customer Centricity Summit, it was clear from Delegate feedback that Social Media was a topic that people in the automotive industry were struggling to understand and needed to be addressed.  I realized that while Social Media is a key aspect of Customer Centricity, it is also being used in many other areas of the industry,” Munzel said.

This year’s Social Media Summit kicked off with Gary Marcotte, Senior Vice President of Marketing for AutoNation. According to Marcotte engagement is pivotal to connecting with customers.

“The only way to get commitment is to engage. When we look at social that is what we look at. It is not about selling cars or making offers. We’re doing it because we’re trying to engage with customers.” Marcotte said.

Marcotte discussed the importance of openness and transparency. In order to be open with customers, businesses must provide a place for discussion. AutoNation is trying to generate consumer discussion by including product reviews on AutoNation sites, similar to retail stores.

“We let people write reviews about their products on our websites. Whether good or bad we let them tell us and we post it. We are trying to emulate the retail community. Nobody goes to Samsung to rate a product, they go to Best Buy. Samsung shows what Best Buy customers say about their TV on their website. That’s the kind of collaboration we’re trying to do with reviews,” Marcotte said.

AutoNation maintains a social media staff within the marketing department tasked with scouring the Internet for any and all information about AutoNation. Staff chimes in on automotive blogs discussing topics relevant to AutoNation, responds to customer concerns on Twitter, or simply interacts with fans on Facebook.

“We look forward to happy shoppers who post photos of themselves and their car when they make a purchase. We also communicate with our stores that hold fundraising or charity events; community things that I like to keep customers aware of so they can participate,” said Mallory Colliflower, Social Media Coordinator at AutoNation.

AutoNation has created a persona of themselves as the “un-dealer”, with that base the Mosaic Campaign was created. Over thirty days, ten prizes are being given away each day through the Mosaic website. Other giveaways require customers to come into the dealership, but that’s not the case of Mosaic, where AutoNation wants to give stuff away without a catch to build brand awareness, customer loyalty, and retention.

“We’re trying to change people’s perceptions. Trying to be the un-dealer. You never give away things with no strings. It’s always come into the dealership, give this to get that, but the community doesn’t work like that. We’re trying to do things dealers wouldn’t do, so that we change the game,” Marcotte said.

Adam Boalt, the President and Founder of GOSO, presented at the 8th Digital Dealer Conference in Orlando. His presentation provides an in-depth view on where social media is headed in the automotive dealer industry. Don’t miss special performance by Judson Laipply, YouTube’s most viral video of all time and a Ford Fiesta Chapter 1 agent.

The presentation deck is available below and check out our pictures on Flickr. The whole presentation is available on Vimeo. I’m also working on getting a higher resolution video uploaded.

GOSO President, Adam Boalt, is at Realtime CrunchUp asking poignant questions to key players in the social media industry.

Twitter COO Dick Costolo opened up the CrunchUp event. As we all know, Twitter is one of the hottest social networks and the site has fallen under a bit of controversy of late due to its $1 billion valuation.

Adam started the first Q&A session of the event by asking Dick Costolo about Twitter revenue. First he asked, is the current revenue $4 million? And, of equal importance, where does this revenue come from?

Costolo vaguely responded by stating, “It’s not $4 million, it’s higher. From a variety of sources.” He did not continue to list any specific areas as to where the money may come from.

The suggested users list that appears when a new account is created has been said to generate revenue for Twitter. But, when Adam asked if the suggested users feature generates dollars, Costolo explicitly said no. He said, “The suggested user list is totally non-financial. It’s a super-primitive mechanism.”

In another session, “Filtering The Stream Roundtable,” Adam was able to speak with key players such as, Facebook, VP of Product, Chris Cox, Microsoft, GM of FUSE Labs, Lili Cheng, Facebook, VP of Platform, Bret Taylor, Google, Google Fellow, Amit Singhal, Seesmic, CEO Loic Le Meur, and MySpace, Chief Product Officer, Jason Hirschhorn.

As GOSO works with the APIs of these networks, Adam’s interest was in how the networks will work together. So, he inquired about the terms of use. He asked, how do the networks plan on having a consolidated real-time data stream if all of the terms of use are different.

He went on to ask, “How do the social networks align in that respect? A standardization of rules? Like Facebook’s new rules. What if something on Twitter goes over to Facebook and it’s against terms of service?”

Bret Taylor spoke for Facebook by saying that over time, specifically the next year, that there will be a big effort in simplifying terms of use. He stated, “I expect simplification to be huge for all of us.” He went on to explain that the networks will not have the same terms, but they will be better. He contended that Facebook’s terms are in place to stop automated spam.

Other panelists did not seem to pose finite answers to the question. Simple shrugs and “I don’t knows” were vaguely offered.

I’m currently en route to the Realtime CrunchUp event being held by TechCrunch.com in San Francisco, CA.  As excited as I am to be heading to an event to check out the latest and greatest in social media; I think I’m equally excited about writing my first blog post from 34,000 feet in the air from my Virgin America flight.

Tomorrow is an exciting day, as we’ll be making some announcements about some new features to our API as well as an integrated RSS reader to our buzz monitoring tool.

Lastly, I want to welcome two new GOSO team members: Jay Muntz and Korenne Richardson!

Watch the event live right from GOSO below, starting at 12pm EST, Friday:

We’ve had several requests to post the presentation that we displayed at Digital Dealer. Enjoy!

Today was our second day at Digital Dealer and again we are very pleased with amount of interest all of the dealers are showing in our product.  We had some good strategic meetings with the folks over at HomeNet, AutoTrader, Edmunds and Cars.com.  Enjoyed meeting with Brad Feik and Cliff Banks of Digital Dealer later in the afternoon.  After the conference we all went out for some BBQ and some music in Nashville.

We arrived to the Digital Dealer Conference today in Nashville, TN. We demo’d our app to multiple dealer groups and some other strategic partners.  Most of the events start tomorrow morning at 7:30 am and we’ll try to update you live from the event via twitter (@mygoso).