Originally Posted by
Ryan Sletcher
Honda was one of the first companies to use social marketing. Car companies try to capture the youth because they believe the first car you own will very likely establish you as a brand loyal customer for at least a couple more purchases in your life. So the aim for all car manufactures is for their entry level cars to be desired by the youth. In the US Honda's entry level car the Honda CRV wasn't popular at all. So, after a lot of research, they changed the name of the car from CRV to Crave and created a microsite to host a competition that challenged people to submit a picture of their 'favorite crave' along with a few lines about why they craved it. The top half of the page was filled with thumbnails of the entries. viewers could mouse over the image and vote on how good the entry was. Now the cool thing was people that submitted an entry told their friends and family to go to the site and vote for their entry. When they did they were inspired to upload their own entry and tell everyone they know to go and vote for it. They wrote about it in their blogs and on their myspace page, they put links to the site and tagged in on digg and del.icio.us and the site got top ranking with goggle. The traditional media found is very interesting and wrote stories about the site (not adverts). it was even talked about on TV. The micro site cost Honda a few thousand $ but brought millions in free publicity. Over a very short period the CRV went from nowhere to one of the top 10 selling cars in the us.
Thats the power of web 2.0. 'Marketing 2.0' is basically a way to tap into the the best form of advertising. Word of mouth.
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