Best Use of the Internet 2006

GM was one of the first Fortune 500 companies to launch a corporate blog, in a year in which it desperately wanted to woo back customers and reestablish itself as an innovative company.

Once the blog went live, GM hoped to attract at least 1,000 visitors a day, encourage other blogs and websites to call attention to pioneering work the company was doing in cyberspace, and close the information gap between customers' ideas about GM's quality and the strides it had recently made. In the case of the latter goal, GM hoped to garner 75% positive coverage about the blog in local and national publications. Hass MS&L argued that by being the first auto manufacturer to establish a well-read blog, it would help to reignite GM's goal of being thought of as a leader. It also believed that the direct feedback a blog created would help the company better understand its customers.

In order to accomplish these goals, the agency asked Bob Lutz, vice chairman, to helm the blog. He immediately embraced the medium and the idea. Hass said it was crucial that the blog retain Lutz's distinctive voice and allow both positive and negative comments.

GM and Hass benchmarked other corporate blogs and read PR and marketing blogs to figure out the best way to facilitate dialogue between Lutz and readers. In launching the blog, GM simply contacted six influential bloggers and alerted them to FastLane's existence. From there, the word spread virally throughout the blogosphere community, and eventually wound up in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Business 2.0, The Financial Times, and others.

The results of the blog's launch blew away GM's expectations. Nearly 1.3 million people, from 90 countries, visited FastLane in its first nine months. More than 5,000 people visited daily, and 90% of the media impressions have been positive. Also, FastLane now has 500 in- bound links from bloggers, a very im- portant criterion in the online world. Shel Holtz, an influential PR blogger, said, "In one month [Lutz] has softened my resistance to GM cars. If I don't watch out, he's going to persuade me to buy one of his cars."

One judge said, "A great new media campaign from a traditional, old-time manufacturing firm. Plus, it used the right spokesman, Lutz, to create a dialogue around product design."

Honorable Mention: Applebee's International: The “Extreme Makeover Portal” featuring “Cy” Pennington

In hoping to improve the efficiency of its internal communications, Applebee's launched a portal, my.applebees.com, where Applebee's corporate workers, franchisees, restaurants, vendors, and partners could all access the same information. Launched in 2003, uptake was still dishearteningly low at the beginning of 2005. The company enlisted its most vocal critics – franchise owners – to help redesign the site for a more easy-to-use experience. Since it used its internal IT department to redesign the site, the campaign did not cost anything. In doing so, Applebee's hoped usage would increase 50%. The company, modeling the redesign after the popular ABC show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, created a fake makeover expert "Cy" Pennington, who revealed the design to the constituents. Monthly traffic went from 31,600 om February to 70,000 in July.

Finalists:

Applebee's
The "Extreme Portal Makeover" featuring Ty Pennington

Hass MS&L and General Motors
GM Fastlane Blog: A Global Giant Shows a Deft Touch

Padilla Speer Beardsley New York and Vuepoints Corp.
Vuepoints Push-Pull Paradigm

Voce Communications and Yahoo
Learning to Listen

Waggener Edstrom Worldwide and Connexion by Boeing
Blogging the Stratosphere 1.0

Sponsor: