Some Serious Buzz Generating at Cadillac

Have you been out there voting? You know, on your favorite local woman zooming around the Bay area in her Cadillac… This recent marketing promotion has been one of the best local examples of using social media to draw interest to a product since perhaps the Save the Tortillas campaign we blogged about recently. (http://chiefballywho.wordpress.com/2009/09/14/social-media-saves-the-tortillas%e2%80%a6literally/)

A recent story in the Times broke down the inspiration for this hip GM promotion (http://www.tampabay.com/news/humaninterest/cadillac-aims-twitter-campaign-at-influential-women/1044681) but essentially, the crux behind it is this: women pay attention to other women. So Cadillac’s got a local ladies in the Tampa and Orlando markets (and in this case, Tampa extends to South Florida including Venice and Sarasota) getting behind the wheel of a new Cadillac SRX for a week and blogging about the experience. How does this help GM? Aah, the SOCIAL aspect of it is the amazingly simple yet effective piece of the equation. Each woman taking part is competing against each other to drive the most web traffic to their blog page. Whatever woman scores the most unique visitors to her page during the week wins $500 for the charity of her choice. So the more they use their own Twitter and Facebook profiles, LinkedIn, any of them… the better chance they have of getting friends, followers, tweeps, etc. to stop by their SRX page and count as a unique visitor.

Kudos to Cadillac! For finding an ingenious way to use social media to raise curiosity and interest in a new product, for bringing Twitter into the conversation with their prospective customers and most of all, for attaching a strong philanthropic element to their marketing campaign. Sure, they are essentially getting a community to do their advertising for them but not without giving back to the community. And by introducing a community campaign that supports local non-profits, it propelled members of these organizations to help further along the mission, too.

If you want to follow the latest blogging contenders, go to www.srxdrivingforce.com.