Jean-Marc Gales, head of the Peugeot and Citroen brands, said in an interview to a German business magazine “Looking at the amount of employed people, Facebook will become the largest country worldwide in the upcoming years. How the automotive industry should deal with this challenge is an important question, which has not been answered yet”. In this context it is considered that Facebook and its user community will become a more and more important opinion-former, which will finally impact buying decisions and customer satisfaction for cars.
At the first glance, the statement of Jean-Marc Gales does not sound revolutionary or frightening, but after thinking about it for a while or doing some research it can be confirmed, that no clear concepts have been established yet. After a quick check of the world’s top ten car manufacturers and their presence in Facebook it turned out, that only Volkswagen and Mercedes seem to have an official page representing their brand and promoting some of their products. All other car producers are represented with fan pages or country specific dealer pages only.
Not all PR professionals seem to share the opinion of Jean-Marc Gales. A survey conducted among 107 PR professionals beginning of 2010 finds, that the importance of social networks is rated between two and three on a scale from one (not important) to five (very important). Furthermore “making use of social community networks” was rated as thirteenth out of 14 possible online PR priorities for the future. Reasons for these results might be different and will not be evaluated further, but linking back to the beginning of this blog entry it reflects the reality.
The conclusion of these different sources is that executives start to understand the increasing importance of social networks for their businesses, but holistic concepts and the implementation of these do not exist yet. From my point of view a number of important questions need to be answered before starting to be active in global social networks like Facebook or others. When having a holistic concept and the capabilities to maintain a social community an implementation can be started. The relevance and urgency of these topics for different industries might be subject of further discussions.
Sources:
http://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/it-medien/auftritt-im-netz-das-grosse-raetsel-facebook;2694956;0
http://www.newventurepublishing.co.uk/newsletter.php?issue=14&PHPSESSID=3f6e0148416bf3b41896022aaa8616ba
http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/CRM-News/Daily-News/The-6-Hidden-Dangers-of-Social-Media-69145.aspx
http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/CRM-News/Daily-News/Whats-the-Most-Popular-Industry-on-Social-Networks-69978.aspx
http://www.goso.com/2010-goso-social-media-report.pdf
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2 comments:
Good. Would have liked to know your thoughts on what "a number of important questions" are. Who is the Car Buyer of the Future and how will he or she buy?
In my opinion the majority of today’s car buyers are not influenced by SN’s when buying a car. This will change in the future when people who grew up with SN’s will be in a position to take car buying decisions. Thus I do agree that the presence of car manufactures in SN’s is important but not as urgent as in other branches (e.g. apparel, music and entertainment).
When formulating strategies for SN’s a number of questions need to be answered, just as:
1. Will the SN presence be localized or equal around the globe? How to deal with cultural differences?
2. How will maintain the content? Will it be outsourced to an agency or will it be own employees, who are familiar with SN’s but not necessary employed in the PR department.
3. How to deal with negative reviews? Fighting back or ignoring these will not improve the public image.
4.To which extend will the SN presences be informal or dialogue oriented?
5.Will the complete range of products be in scope or just a part of it?
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