Case Study

Ford Motor Company Limited

The Project: Ford Digital Snippets

Timeline: Launched September 2007

Client Particulars: Ford Motor Company, a global automotive industry leader based in Dearborn, Mich., manufactures or distributes automobiles across six continents. With about 213,000 employees and about 90 plants worldwide, the company’s wholly owned automotive brands include Ford, Lincoln, Mercury and Volvo.

Project Overview: In 2007, Ford recognized that in an environment where everyone is a publisher, keeping a tight reign on corporate content simply no longer made sense. Opportunities to help online content producers start conversations and tell richer, better informed stories were being lost because bloggers and others were not interested in signing up for media site access

The Strategy: SMG’s proprietary Digital Snippets platform enabled online digital content producers to instantly access the resources they needed – images, video, informative content, corporate quotes and contact information, and to receive automatic updates via RSS.

Research Methodology: Through a series of interviews with key stakeholders within Ford as well as a representative sampling of online influencers, SMG recognized that there was a tremendous amount of valuable content being produced but not shared with people who needed it.

The Challenge: Find a cost-effective, resource-light method of getting hundreds of pieces of valuable content to target audiences

The Results: Hundreds of unsolicited blog posts on influential auto blogs – including the coveted Autopia section of Wired Magazine.