General Motors: Using Social Media to Avert a Crisis — Live from BlogWell

1:30 — Bergen Anderson introduces General Motors‘ Manager of Social Media Communications, Joe LaMuraglia.

1:31 — Joe: What’s in a name? I’m going to talk today about that name Checy vs. Chevrolet

1:32 — Joe’s slide: 6/10/2010 is the day that Chevy dies.  A memo, that was in draft form, was leaked. The memo seemed to forbid employees to use the nickname Chevy.

1:33 — Joe explains how he media got ahold of it but didn’t get all the facts right.

1:33 — Joe: But does this matter? We wanted to control but you cant control this stuff anymore. You can only do damage control.

1:34– Joe explains that like a game of telephone, the memo quickly became a story about the company banning the nickname Chevy from employees and customers.

1:34 — Joe: The memo was not true and was being blown out of reality, but perception is reality and people were already talking about it.

1:35 — Joe: Then the commentary began. There was a lot of discussion about how GM could control what customers could call their products.

1:36 — Joe says that this one day caused conversations to spike off the charts. A lot of online polls discussing the announcement popped up.

1:37 — Joe says that customers were upset and were in disbelief that the name was even an issue.

1:38 — Joe: Here’s the thing, the number of comments were incredibly high so there was obviously some serious passion among our consumers.

1:39 — Joe says the social media team met with corporate communications and advised them on what to do.

1:39 — Joe says that an offical statement was sent out, but bloggers and consumers weren’t impressed with the response.

1:39 — Joe: We had a lot of discussion about how much social media should be used because the bad attention wasn’t going away. The social media team realized the tide wasn’t going to change, so they decided to make a video in their own words.

1:40 — Joe says that they grabbed a flip camera and briefed an executive for 5 minutes — and then filmed a 2 minute video of him explaining what had happened. The video was then posted on YouTube.

1:41 — Joe says that right after that went out, negative criticism went down. To date, the video has been viewed over 11K  times.

1:41 — Joe jokes that the conversation changed to “whose taking this shaky video?” (He admits that he was.) Though a little embarrassed that his production skills were called out, it was great that people were focusing on him, rather than the memo.

1:42 — Joe talks about lessons learned:

1. “A company owns their trademark, the customers own the brand,” Peter Esperson, Online Community Lead for LEGO

2. It is OK to say, “We were wrong.”

3. The story will likely not die quickly if it has picked up steam.

4. ALWAYS have a Flipcam and a TRIPOD ready!

Q & A

Q: Wendy, Kraft Foods — How did you get executives to approve the video so quickly?

A: We didn’t! We figured it had to be done, so we’d apologize later. But because it worked, people let us off the hook.

Q: Having seen how the video turned out, are you more comfortable using social media to deal with criticism in the future?

A: Corporate communications is learning to trust us a little more. We understand the business. We understand what’s appropriate to say.

Q: In this case you were able to do something low quality and low cost. What are you doing that’s higher quality production? What’s the sweet spot between something too polished and something too shaky?

A: We have a lot of stuff on the plate with video production. Check out “Faces of GM.” Also, when we have a big event coming up, we’re cognizent of overly polished messages.

Q: Whats the conversation like now?

A: The communication of Chevy vs. Chevrolet has died down a little bit. But we’re tapping into that passion a lot with the GM brand overall.  But it’s still a job.

Q: What’s your perspective on how much control social media should have to be able to go around corporate communications?

A: Because we have a social media department and social media policy. We can’t do it all the time, but in this case it was the necessary action.

Q: Was it in your mind to move that fast and circumvent approvals because of other issues going on in GM?

A: When the situation came around, we were able to act on it because we really want to humanize this company.