Christopher Barger on social media communications at GM

Several people who have been following my video interviews with Fritz Henderson, CEO of General Motors and Bob Lutz, GM vice chairman have asked me how I was able to score such high profile discussions.

Here's how: I wrote a critical blog post in June Attention GM: Here are the top 5 marketing ideas for your reinvention. The post received hundreds of tweets and more than 50 comments. Very quickly (within hours actually) I was engaged with the social media team at GM. They turned me around. I went from a critic to a supporter. I’ll let Christopher Barger, director, social media at General Motors tell the story from his perspective in this video.

The video is 6 minutes. Below are some times if you want to skip to a particular part of the video.

Filmed with my Flip video camera and edited on iMovie.
Direct link to the video here.

Favorite quote: “Part of humanizing the company is showing that you have a life.”

:00 – 1:30 On how GM monitors social media and how my negative blog post and tweets were found by the social media team at GM.

1:30 – 2:50 The organization of the social media team at GM

2:50 - 3:30 Of the many thousands of people talking about GM online, how does GM choose who to engage?

3:30 - 5:40 How Barger deals with 24x7 communications in an always-on world.

Tomorrow I will post the final GM video interview. I also discuss some of the new GM product lineup and thoughts for how to market cars like the Chevy Volt.

Comments

[Kim Feraday]

Most interesting comment for me was that they choose to react to people based on thoughtful comments. This opens up the opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue and ultimately build lasting communities. It would be interesting to see if GM has a strategy to draw these people into longer running dialogues (using other SM tools) around a variety of topics that GM feels are important (product strategy, public perception of viability, etc). In other words converting what might be temporary communities into longer lasting ones.

[David Meerman Scott]

Kim, I found this to be very interesting as well. I had not heard anyone articulate the "thoughtful" angle until Chris.

Thanks for the comment.

[Christopher Barger]

Kim - we do try to not have many one-off conversations; we'll try to finish those initial reactions with something like "chat me up on Twitter any time at @gmblogs or @cbarger" or pointing people to one of our blogs. I know it's not a perfect solution but we do start to open the door to further conversations.

As for deeper engagement, I'll offer one example: about a month ago, we invited 100 consumers -- some we met on Twitter, some who blog, some who wrote in to our CEO via "Tell Fritz" on gmreinvention.com -- to our design center to meet with our leadership team and to view not only our 2010 portfolio but not-yet-revealed products for 2011, 2012 and beyond. Our leaders spent the entire day with these 100 consumers -- some of whom were supporters, some of whom had been critical of GM -- and listened to their feedback, answered their questions, solicited their input as to what we have coming and what we might be missing. We've continued that connection with these 100 people through private executive chats and ongoing Twitter and FB engagement, and I suspect we'll be doing more like it going forward.

To read one attendee's perspective, here is a link from one of our guests - a student radio station manager from Sacred Heart College in Connecticut. (It's not just David who gets access to our leaders.) ;-)

http://notesofcheerfulcalamity.wordpress.com/2009/08/11/general-motors-producttechnology-event-10-aug-09/

Not that we've totally cracked the code on better engaging people or reaching out to consumers and potential customers; we've still got much work to do. I'm just offering this as one example of the different things we're trying that, I think, speak to some of the things you mentioned. Thanks for your comment! -- CB

[David Wenger]

It is interesting that even in a large corporation like GM the tools for tracking social media conversations can be very simple. I also use TweetDeck searches, which are not complicated or sophisticated, but get the job done. I'm asking for other suggestions of free or low-cost monitoring. Thanks!

http://iduniversity.wordpress.com/2009/09/29/using-tweetdeck-as-a-simple-social-media-monitor/