Starship Trooper: Mercedes-Benz Bodied Acura Integra Convertible

If you’re still with us and haven’t gone out looking for a bug swatter, there’s more of this lime-green creation to be seen in the video after the jump.

Judging from the cuts on the front fenders and the shape of the bonnet, we reckon it’s a mid-1990s Acura Integra Coupe.

The proud owner of the vehicle chopped off the roof to turn the Japanese coupe into a convertible model and then proceeded with the styling transformation that includes a custom body kit imitating the looks of many Mercedes-Benz roadsters and the customary trick doors.

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Promo Magazine Guest Article

I had the opportunity to do a guest article for WOMMA's (Word of Mouth Marketing organization) PROMO magazine. I covered some of the things we are doing at AT&T to tighten up our Facebook presence and why that matters on a platform like Facebook. Also, I should add that automotive brand Acura did a similar effort late last year as they moved to consolidate all of their vehicle fan pages under the one Acura brand fan page, a wise decision in my humble opinion.

Take a look if you are curious what I do in my day job leading social media at AT&T. Click here to read the article: "AT&T’s Social Exec Talks About Focusing its Facebook Presence"

Automotive Facebook Fans by Brand: March 2011

March was a rather subtle month without a lot of on-site fan growth ads from the automotive brands, but it was the first month a new brand returned to the United States. It’s been 27 years since Fiat has sold a car here. They returned with the Fiat 500 and I have added Fiat to this list. Like BMW, MINI and Mercedes, Fiat also has a USA-focused Facebook fan page, but like those brands I am reporting on the global brand’s Facebook fan page, but do record all of the USA-focused fan pages.


Meanwhile, Acura continued to run and promote their “Compete Like a Pro” contest for the all-new TSX Sport Wagon (as an interesting side-note, the TSX Sport Wagon is the Japanese Honda Accord wagon that everyone was hoping for back when the Honda CrossTour was announced last year causing quite an uproar on the Honda fan page.) The “Compete Like a Pro” contest is an interesting example of fan growth from marketing, CRM, and engagement.

Back in January they promoted the contest and bought some Facebook ads to support the effort creating a 23% increase in fan growth. In February, some marketing continued but most of the effort to promote the contest was done through Acura’s email communications (see image at left from a February 22 email) and there was some promotion by contestants to create interest (votes) for the contest that resulted in a 10% fan growth. As the initial surge of contestant promotion tapered, so did the fan growth, as it was only 5% in March when the contest was closing the voting.

Many of us see friends in our own communities promote – ask for – votes when they do an online contest. This initial surge in friend participation comes to an end rather quickly and then near the end of the contest, the highly competitive top people in the votes make an additional request for votes, but this is a much smaller group. What we see with the Acura contest is fairly typical and shows that the biggest impact in fan growth is still advertising to promote instead of counting on organic growth. The final 5% growth in March is a normal organic fan growth so the contest was doing very little in fan growth. Of course it might of (and hopefully did for Acura) create more clicks to dot.com and engagement which were probably the primary goals of the contest.

There was very little else going on in March for the automotive brands on Facebook. Lexus saw some positive growth with the biggest bump of 22% fan growth coming from their heavy media buys around the all-new Lexus CT200h.



Note: Unfortunately I missed a month in March, a first since starting this monthly post in November of 2009. I did record the fan numbers and you can see the early fan numbers from March in this post. I never did a February 2011 report, but have all the raw data if any one wants it. Please send me an email at red335i@yahoo.com if you do.

Acura Shuts Down their Vehicle Facebook Fan Pages

I have never been a big fan of automakers starting vehicle fan pages. There are exceptions to my thinking, for example halo cars like the Mustang or Corvette or when one vehicle is more compelling than your brand alone - like the Subaru WRX.

My thinking is you are lucky to get a person to fan any of your fan pages, so why not drive people to your brand fan page where you can talk about the car/truck/suv they are interested in, but also market some of your other products and brand messages. It's a great opportunity to showcase your product portfolio.

Acura has decided this is the way to go. They started with a strategy of having the Acura brand fan page, but also have a tab called "Vehicle Lineup" where fans could click and go to each vehicle fan page. Now Acura fans click the vehicles in the tab and are taken to the Acura.com website vehicle page and isn't this all about driving consumers to your optimized shopping site? Okay, it's not all about that, but you should be working to get fans to your .com site.

The other reason to not have unique vehicle fan pages, especially for brands like Acura that are more defined by the brand than one vehicle, is the extra resources to manage the vehicle pages and also you start segmenting your fans so your advertising becomes a discussion around whether to drive Acura fans or vehicle page fans. Why not simplify?

On an interesting note, Acura did not get the fans moved from the vehicle pages to the brand page. I'm guessing a lot of brands will not change their strategy because they cannot simply transfer fans from one product to a brand page. This is the old issue with sunken costs and how some tend to hold on to bad investments simply because they spent a bunch of money already.

It will be interesting to see if other automakers (and other industries) will catch on and focus on building their brand, not individual product pages.

Automotive Facebook Fans by Brand: February 2010

It’s been a very interesting month on Facebook for the automotive industry. A lot of companies are getting more aggressive with their marketing efforts and showed up with some decent spend promoting their brand fan pages in February, the Super Bowl happened, and Toyota is in a tailspin.

Marketing For Fans

Several brands did “Facebook Fan” campaigns. Fan campaigns are ad unit buys that typically show up on the Home News Feed page of Facebook in the Sponsored section between Suggestions and Events content. The ad units feature a “Become a Fan” button that allows people to easily fan a page without even having to visit it.

Dodge ran the most significant Fan campaign in February. They most have bought a full month of ad units, only the third time I’ve ever seen a brand do such a thing (VW and Honda being the other two.) Dodge ran ads featuring two messages. One featured their Super Bowl video “Man’s Last Stand” and the other linked to the Dodge Fan Page tab talking about their Super Beard Contest.

Mazda also bought several weeks of Fan ad units in conjunction with their Mazda 2 vehicle launch. The ads asked users to “Join the Movement.” The ads did not feature a vehicle image; instead, the unit was a blue-on-blue checkered flag with a small Mazda logo. Very little branding in the units but Mazda had a significant percentage jump in Facebook fans, a whopping 568% growth in February. Could it have been more with a stronger logo or did they gain more with less branding? Tough to say, but Mazda definitely attracted a strong number of fans with their buy.

It’s hard to say whether Dodge or Mazda did better with their marketing buy on Facebook without knowing impressions bought and how targeted the buy was. Percentage wise Mazda did far better than Dodge’s 126% growth, but Dodge had a much higher starting number of fans. Dodge grew by 36,000 fans versus Mazda’s 18,000 fans or two times the growth in numbers over Mazda.



Volkswagen did a little bit of marketing in February too to further promote their PunchDub Super Bowl ad. They only ran Fan ad units for either a day or few days after the Sunday following the game. The ad units also included the Super Bowl commercial they did.

Ram Trucks and Acura both did marketing buys too, but nothing that significant. Acura saw growth of 10,000 fans but that probably didn’t involve much of an ad buy with targeted marketing spend and some fan growth due to organic increases; though, the 185% growth number shows they did accurately reach their fans.

Let’s Talk Toyota

This morning as I was finishing this article an article showed up on AdAge about “The Cult of Toyota” and how since the recall Toyota fans are rallying to the brand with a 10% growth in fans since the recall announcements that started at the end of January.

From the article:

“According to Doug Frisbie, Toyota Motor Sales USA's national social media and marketing integration manager, the automaker has actually grown its Facebook fan base more than 10% since late January, around the time of the marketer's Jan. 21 recall announcement and its Jan. 26 stop-sale date.

“In fact, Mr. Frisbie said the automaker has been somewhat surprised by the large number of customers who have leapt to Toyota's defense in ‘an authentic way.’

“That's a testament to the resilience of the brand, but also to Toyota's ability to quickly pick up one of the most important tools in a crisis-communications handbook: social media.”

First of all, the number is 15% in February, but that’s not my issue with the assessment.



If we look back at Toyota’s growth in fans month-by-month we notice two things. One, they have doubled their percentage growth of fans gained from 7% to 15% from the January to February. So, AdAge is right the brand is attracting more fans since the recall so the recall must be the reason. Maybe not if we look at what else stands out in the data – they grew even more in November 2009 yet there was no recall then nor did they market for fans that month.

I would argue one couldn’t really account any surge in fans due to the recall. This is only four months of data and it is not clear what a typical growth in fans is for the brand. It looks to be somewhere around 11% on average so a 15% gain in one month really isn’t that significant especially when you consider how many other brands not marketing and not going through any major PR issues are also gaining fans in the double-digits.

One of the interesting things about doing this monthly "Facebook Fans by Brands" report is seeing how the spin is done to showcase things that seem unusual to the casual observer, but are really not. What would be interesting with the Toyota situation is to evaluate the brand’s conversations on its Facebook fan page since the recall. Now that might show something unusual or interesting.

A Couple House Cleaning Items

Suzuki decided to move their Facebook automotive content to a new Fan Page for Suzuki Autos that did cause some dip in their numbers since my prior calculations were using a more broad Suzuki Fan page that encompassed all of the brand's vehicles including motorcycles and recreational products.



Finally, I have been tracking Scion's brand page for quite sometime but just learned this month, when the fan page was updated with information about it being an Unofficial Fan Page, that it is not managed by the brand. Also, the page received a new friendly URL http://www.facebook.com/UnofficialScion. So, I have removed Scion from the report since they currently do not have a Fan Page for the brand; though, they do have one now for their Release Series vehicle line.

Automotive Facebook Fans by Brand: January 2010

There is one clear leader in this month’s Automotive Facebook Fans by Brand report: Volvo. They ran some advertising campaigns developed for the Facebook platform. The first is one that’s been up a few months but was continuing to get some media dollars, Drive Around the World. The other is a lifestyle brand experience called Ice Camp that also has its own Facebook page.


The Drive Around the World has Facebook friends travel together as each friend takes over the drive like passing a baton in a race. Volvo will then donate 15,000 Euros to a charity that fights Global Warming. Obviously the game has broad appeal with the charity aspect and social enablement. Altogether Volvo saw a 421% increase in January fan numbers. Quite impressive though like many of the huge percentage changes we have seen they only started with 11,875 fans at the beginning of the month.

Most brands saw typical gains in January. GM brands saw a slowing down since backing off media spend on the platform, particularly Chevrolet and Cadillac (both had 50% gains in recent months), but this is typical and shows the difference between organic and media driven growth.

Zoom. Zoom.

Mazda saw a nice improvement this month. They also moved their Mazda North America page into the Mazda Facebook fan page which got rid of some confusion around how one follows the brand. The now retired Mazda North America fan page was more for Public Relations communications which seemed duplicative to the http://www.facebook.com/Mazda fan page.

Both MINI and Acura ran advertisements in Facebook that I caught during the month. The Acura one was for increasing fans of their ZDX vehicle page, not the primary brand fan page. Meanwhile MINI promoted their coming Countryman SUV. This shows that both brands are interested in further developing vehicle fan pages which to me seems odd since both are niche vehicles and it would be better to get consumers engaged more with the brand than an isolated product.

Toyota’s Public Relations Issue

Toyota is an interesting brand this month, not so much for its growth but it’s public relations fiasco with its faulty pedals on 8 vehicles. Currently, the Toyota fan page has a status update pointing fans to http://www.toyota.com/recall for information about the company’s response and updates. This shows that brand pages can act as another communication medium to keep consumers up to date on major announcements.

Brands be warned; one “fan” keeps posting a news video that discusses Toyota allegedly concealing and destroying information. That “fan” has posted the story five times with four posts having been deleted by the page administrators. He continues to post the story on the Toyota fan page wall. So, it works both ways and the brand should just let the post live since it is just a link to a news story and removing these posts might cause more of a PR issue.





Download the Excel file: Facebook Auto Fan File (January 2010)

Someone Needs to Tell BMW Widgets are Passe

It’s no secret: I’m a BMW fan boy. However, I just don’t get what led to the development of the BMW 5-Series Desktop widget application.

As part of the 5-Series launch in the UK, BMW launched a website experience showcasing some early images and facts about the car. They also added a Desktop widget application people can download to stay up-to-date on 5-series news.

What bothers me about this whole execution is what rubbish it is. It's either a low-cost recycling of another BMW widget that's been around since 2006. Or someone obviously convinced BMW to invest in a widget to keep customers current with 5-Series news, but then someone realized what everyone on a widget advertising idea realizes, Wait, we don’t have enough content to keep things fresh and interesting. So what else can we put in the widget?

So like many they added the cliché clock, weather and news feeds to keep things updated. The news feeds are the funniest part as they are just topical feeds that have nothing to do with BMW. Users can change their preferences (see image at right) and the content is probably chosen because it is relevant to the target consumer.

The idea of featuring what is thought to be relevant content is nonsense, because people already have tons of places they already regularly go to get news and chances of your brand’s random news feed matching someone’s needs is pretty rare.

We can assume the news feeds match the target consumer profiles the marketing team came up with or what existing publisher relationships the BMW brand already has established. The news information is enlightening, as I never knew the BMW 5-Series segment was so enthralled with “Sexy Surfer-Girl Swimwear” (see image at left)? But then again who isn’t interested in Malibu’s latest swimwear styles.

The widget also doesn’t extend the website experience or include additional information about the new car that can’t be found elsewhere. There simply is no reason to use the widget if you’ve already been to the 5-Series reveal site, which you had to have visited to download the widget. With no new vehicle content or insight into the vehicle’s features, it lacks any value to people interested in the product.

It’s really disappointing that a car as cool and modern gets a lame 2007 widget to help launch it. Widgets were all the rage several years ago and some companies did get it right, like Acura’s Navigation widget that showcased their technology in a cool, useful way. Plus it has been successful with over 51,000 downloads from just Yahoo!'s widget site alone (BMW's 2006 widget mentioned earlier has 21,000 downloads.)

Unfortunately, the BMW 5-Series widget is a hobbled together mess that is trying hard to be valuable to its customers. I wonder how many will keep using it after seeing how little information it provides and how every link about the product, except images, opens a new browser window taking people to the BMW UK site. I’m guessing very few installs will survive post initial curiosity.

Cadillac Launches Redesigned Shopping Site

Cadillac released a complete redesign of their shopping site on October 23. The new Cadillac.com showcases the cars with larger images, 360 views on the home page and vehicle home pages, and includes a much more concise navigation. Large images with easy to read text also promote different areas of the site in a scrolling content area on the home page.

There are some standout improvements on the site. Mainly the use of crisp studio images that make the cars easy to see while also maximizing the viewable space on the page. Cadillac also reworked some key short comings from their prior shopping experience, namely a much improved offers section that communicates any discounting or financing available. Some issues still remain especially in the brand experience and features sections of the vehicle pages.

The Build & Price section utilizes a few good practices including the ability to choose a pre-built configuration with features and trim level pre-selected for those consumers who do not want to spend the time selecting options. Also, the pricing section integrates a colorizer and 360 view of the exterior. Unfortunately, the interior 360 and colorizer do not fully let you see all available options. In fact, what it did on some interior trim levels was present a background image of the interior with a color swatch image sitting on top (see image at left to better understand.)

Cadillac’s Help Me Choose page provides an easy to use vehicle portfolio selection tool that allows users to select their vehicle needs by capabilities, price, features, and a few other options. It’s a helpful way to navigate the vehicle line for consumers who may not exactly know which Cadillac fits their driving needs.

The biggest improvement is the redesigned pricing and offers area. Before (and I wish I had a screenshot of it) the Cadillac offers were very complicated to read and not easy to understand. The new site communicates offers in an easy to read format that clearly sections off each offer in a clear, precise way, whereas, the old site used to just list the offers in a string of line-by-line text. Now the offers communication is far clearer to consumers. Plus if there is still any confusion, there is a floating navigation item where one can ask a question and chat with a live person.

One of the most glaring shortcomings is very limited information about a vehicle's features and options. The vehicle pages don't effectively communicate what the features or product strengths are. In fact, all the shopper gets to see is a Features & Specs page that lists everything as if people intuitively understand what an "Ultraview Sunroof" or "Xenon HID Headlamps" is. There is no detail information on any vehicle feature and this is a glaring shortcoming when comparing to other OEM shopping sites.

Included in the new design is a brand section called Experience Cadillac where videos, concepts, merchandise, events and social media properties are promoted. Also included are links to learn more about OnStar and XM Radio. The issue here is that it looks like a brand messaging area similar to the Only Mercedes-Benz or Acura’s Advance experiences, but unfortunately there is no strong messaging in the Experience Cadillac section that communicates what the brand means; instead, it is simply a location for things that probably didn’t fit well into the main navigation neatly.

The Experience Cadillac section also down plays the awards and accolades of the brand as well as the brand’s heritage by including that content in a lesser sub-navigation. What’s unclear is why these items are not highlighted in the tile navigation given to other elements of this section?

One area that was baffling is the Lifestyle and Events content tile in Experience Cadillac. Clicking the tile shows a “Presidential Limo” tile that communicates the limo Cadillac developed for President Obama, but that’s it. Not sure this is a lifestyle communication, unless you’re the President. Certainly this content should evolve and may just be a content deficiency at launch to be later more fully developed.

Some navigation and images are cutoff. When viewing the Vehicles navigation tab I can see some additional navigation elements but they are not viewable except for some top level text showing something is there (the missing elements are Compare Vehicles, Help Me Choose and CPO.) Also, when viewing the Experience Cadillac section and some other sections the “Cadillac” logo is missing the “Ca” of the image. This might be an issue with Macintosh as I was able to see these elements on a PC I also use.

Overall the experience is much improved and the addition of the Help Me Choose and 360 views on the vehicle homepages are welcomed additions. The Experience Cadillac section holds some promise and hopefully will evolve into a better brand communication section instead of an area of the site for content that just needs a home.

Banner Glut

Okay, here is a test: Who sponsored this page on Yahoo! Movies? (Insert Jeopardy music) Okay you don't really need 30 seconds to figure this one out. Yep, you guessed it... Acura. Congratulations! You win the Over Sold Online Media Placement award.

Not much to say about this one except that I didn't realize Acura's target consumers had such a passion for The Three Stooges. I would've guessed Three Stooges fans were more Scion xB drivers.