Automakers Blog to Make Their Point, Connect With Customers

Automakers Blog to Make Their Point, Connect With Customers

By Dale Buss

When Chrysler CEO Bob Nardelli didn’t like the negative stories being written about the automaker in the business press over the past couple of weeks, he didn’t write nasty letters to the editor that may or may not have been published. He didn’t call a press conference to discredit the reports.

He blogged.

He used Chrysler’s The Firehouse blog to set the record straight that the automaker was not in the dire financial straits that had been reported. He insisted Chrysler was making progress in its turnaround and had the full backing of new owner Cerberus Capital Management.

The day after Chrysler posted Nardelli's blog, newspapers covered it as a story, demonstrating one of the many ways automakers are using blogs to get their viewpoints across as well as to communicate with customers and potential buyers.

Chrysler, GM, Toyota Take Blog Lead

Chrysler, along with General Motors and Toyota, have jumped out to a huge lead among automakers by launching and expanding their own blogs. So far, Ford, Nissan and Honda have unapologetically refrained from starting their own blogs.

Blogging automakers are enthusiastic about their experiences to date. The online, interactive journals give them a venue for constant communication with consumers who are the most enthusiastic about – or interested in – the companies and their vehicles, especially young consumers who are most likely to be on the Internet. Blogs have proven a great way to state and substantiate a corporate attribute that just isn’t possible elsewhere, including in the auto-oriented blogs that are published by others.

As was the case with Nardelli and Chrysler, the blogs provide an easy-to-use platform for getting carmakers’ viewpoints on the record and for channeling the public’s criticism. And blogs comprise an unprecedented arena for demonstrating some personality in a colorful industry that nevertheless can seem very staid to consumers.

That’s part of what Bruce Ertmann had in mind when he flashed cheekiness that seemed uncharacteristic of Toyota when Al Gore III was arrested last summer on drug charges after being stopped for speeding in his blue Prius. Ertmann, a Toyota marketing man who is the main author of the company’s Open Road blog, zinged the young patrician and then noted: “We’ve heard from some of our Prius owners that say it’s kind of nice to know the car is not a slug.”

Yet, already in their young existence, the blogs also have demonstrated the danger to automakers of leaving the door to the general public too wide open. Online denizens have embraced GM’s FastLane blog, which is mainly written by Vice Chairman Robert Lutz – a charismatic figure and a former fighter pilot who easily stands out against the industry’s legion of cookie cutter executives. But in the 2-1/2 years that Lutz has been blogging, he has built up what amounts to a cult following that reflexively objects if the busy executive goes more than a few days between his personal posts.

“If it’s been awhile since an entry from Bob, people ask, ‘Don’t you care about us anymore?’” says Christopher Barger, GM’s director of global communications technology. “The idea that consumers feel that they have that kind of personal relationship with someone at his level isn’t something that we anticipated.”

And all of the blogging companies must constantly resist some consumers’ attempts to turn the blog into a discussion of their problems with their individual vehicle. Automakers refuse to allow their blogs to get bogged down in that way and quickly refer any such posters to their corporate customer-service personnel.

Here’s a look at what the three major blogging automakers are doing:

GM: FastLane was the industry’s first company-sponsored blog, a truly giant leap of faith when the company made it nearly three years ago. Now, GM has a total of six blogs, including GM Tuner Source , aimed at gearheads, and one devoted solely to the Cadillac CTS.

FastLane by far is GM’s dominant blog. In October, it had 85,000 page views, more than 45,000 monthly visitors, and about 2,000 daily visitors. Consumers have posted more than 18,000 comments over its history.

While it features Barger and other GM “personalities” and their viewpoints, FastLane really is Lutz’s baby. In it, he shares his experiences in helping run GM and, mostly, his opinions of the company’s cars, vehicles, and features, as well as what is going on in the industry as a whole. And lately, Barger has taken to running videos of Lutz, such as one that chronicled his visit to the Woodward Avenue Dream Cruise in Detroit in August.

But like anything else in the virtual world, GM’s blogs take on a life of their own. For example, over the last year Barger noticed a significantly growing interest in “green” topics among FastLane devotees – so much so that he feared demands to feed this interest would change the fun, product-oriented nature of FastLane. So he has recently shifted almost all discussion of environmental and energy topics to FYI, GM’s main blog for conveying its viewpoint.

“When we did that, I got feedback that said, ‘Give us more credit: Greens and auto enthusiasts aren’t mutually exclusive,’” Barger says. “It took me by surprise and even made me reconsider, just for awhile, that maybe we should keep the two blogs as one.”

One of Barger’s biggest challenges is deciding when to create new blogs. He’d like to launch a new one devoted to Chevrolet’s resuscitation of the long-dormant Camaro brand in a new 2009 vehicle, for instance. How many readers the blog gets isn’t Barger’s biggest concern; he assumes that, like GM’s other blogs, it will start out being few in number but passionate about the topic. Rather, Barger is worried that he won’t be able to find or develop an author or authors for the Camaro blog “who recognize the time commitment involved and can post frequently enough to keep the community engaged.”

Toyota: Since Open Road began on June 1, Toyota’s blog has pushed to close to 1,000 individual readers a day. It began in part as a way to supplement – with a Toyota spin – the discussions that already were occurring in the blogosphere around the company’s new products and launches. And the company has introduced fun elements, such as the weekly, “Where Will You Drive Your Toyota This Weekend?,” a Friday feature that consists of consumers’ postings of their mobility plans for the next couple of days.

But quickly, Open Road also has evolved into a major platform for Toyota’s corporate point of view. Ertmann, Toyota’s corporate manager for consumer-generated media, pays a lot of attention to green topics and to building up Toyota’s environmental credentials; in fact, he says Toyota is considering launching another blog just on such issues.

However, Ertmann also is quick to use Open Road to discuss or counter news or opinions about Toyota that enter the vast media marketplace. In October, for example, after Consumer Reports reported an unprecedented slippage by Toyota vehicles in the magazine’s annual quality survey, Irv Miller, group vice president for corporate communications, took to Open Road to dispute the allegations of “some cracks in [Toyota’s ] armor.”

“On balance, Toyota products had a strong showing, just not as strong as we are used to seeing,” Miller blogged. “We aren’t happy with the results and will redouble our efforts to strengthen our quality and reliability – to kaizen. After all, these two issues are of utmost importance to consumers and the hallmark of our brands.”

Chrysler: The company launched Voices of Chrysler , a blog that shares corporate viewpoints and also blog entries from various employees “who have something to say to customers about our products and about what they do,” says Jackie Headapohl, editor of the blog. It already garners approximate monthly traffic of more than 30,000 visitors.

Among other things, Voices of Chrysler has given company executives a strong taste of some of the passion that certain consumers feel about the company’s vehicles. For example, a huge part of the discussion on Voices of Chrysler has been around the prospect of the company discontinuing production of its PT Cruiser retro-styled compact. “A large contingent of consumers are very ardent about the future survival” of the car, says Ed Garsten, Chrysler’s manager of electronic communications.

Dave Stallcup is one of those. “We’re trying to point out to Chrysler that they’ve still got a lot of support for it,” says Stallcup, an auto-parts salesman in Oklahoma City who posts as “PT Dave.” Chrysler doesn’t comment on new-product plans even on its blog, although the PT appeared to be on the Chrysler board’s chopping block for a time.

Actually, the first blog Chrysler launched is The Firehouse, named after The Firehouse pub Chrysler operates during the Detroit auto show press days. Initially, it was mainly devoted to the viewpoints of one employee: Jason Vines, the company’s public-relations vice president who recently resigned apparently due to disagreements with Nardelli. Vines always enjoyed wrangling with journalists and others around what Chrysler was doing, what its executives were saying and what was developing in the industry, and The Firehouse – an invitation-only blog aimed at news-media representatives – gave him an unprecedented platform.

At the same time, Chrysler had been supplementing Vines’ entertaining verbal riffs with lots of other stuff of interest to the few thousand invited visitors to The Firehouse, including a weekly corporate “news” summery called Under the Pentastar and posts of new Chrysler TV ads. Chrysler also posted audio of its executives’ comments at the industry’s annual issues-oriented gathering in Traverse City, Mich., last summer.

Apparently, The Firehouse is proving effective in promoting Chrysler’s viewpoint. “If we don’t do an e-mail push using The Firehouse,” says Mike Ellis, Chrysler’s editorial director of online media, “we sometimes don’t see as much traffic for things that we think are worthy of attention.”

Other Automakers Hold Off on Blogging

Yet even given the enthusiasm of GM, Toyota and Chrysler for their blogs, other big automakers are holding back. While Nissan, for example, monitors others’ blogs about the industry, “we do not engage in blogging directly as we do not want to artificially influence consumer feedback or impressions,” says spokeswoman Kathryn Fields.

Honda and Ford don’t go so far as to pan corporate blogging. “We definitely keep an eye on it and are looking ways to interact more with the blogosphere,” says Honda spokesman Chris Martin. And Jim Cain, a Ford spokesman, says that while the company isn’t “actively engaged in things like executive blogging at this time,” Ford believes “there’s lots of potential to expand.”

Anything less than rivals’ zealous leap into the corporate blogosphere would surprise Barger. “It baffles me that any company would miss the opportunity to engage directly with their base of consumers or potential consumers,” he says, “especially in an environment of so much criticism of our industry.”

Michelle Krebs:  is Editor-in-Chief of AutoObserver.com. Follow @AutoObserver on Twitter.