Christopher Barger knows first-hand the challenges the automotive industry has faced in recent years. As General Motors’ director of global social media, Barger is in a unique position of determining social programs while also remaining active in the communities that his company has built. As he says, “Let’s face it the auto industry, and GM in particular, have given people plenty to be unhappy about in the past few years.” As the industry and GM have focused on rebuilding, however, social has become a significant part of that. Barger is passionate and adamant about the importance and influence of community. In the latest installment of 100 Brains, the former IBM blogger-in-chief talks about his own social transition, how GM and the auto industry are using social media to help in a rebirth, and his prediction that social “gurus” will be found out and create a leveling of the social media industry as a whole.
Q. How did you get started, and more important, how did you take what you learned and apply it to the automotive industry?
A. I got started completely by accident. I was a speechwriter at IBM and probably could have continued in that specialty for the rest of my career. But I was tired of always writing about business and technology, so when blogs came along it offered me a creative outlet and I started one in spring 2003. (It’s long since been killed.) My bosses at IBM learned of it in late 2004/early 2005, called me to HQ and informed me that they’d been reading it (which led me to think I was being Dooced)… they said they knew there would be a business application for blogs at some point and since I obviously knew how to build a community, I should help them figure out what that business meaning would be for IBM. (So I went from thinking I was fired to getting a promotion in 60 seconds!) I was IBM’s blogger-in-chief for two years before going to GM in spring 2007.
The most obvious way to apply to the auto industry what I learned from running my own blog was the importance of building a community and acting with the community’s interests first. I think the natural first instinct of a lot of people in this industry would be to see Facebook as a captive audience of 500 million, to see a blog or Twitter as a chance to push our standard marketing content out to a broader group of people. That’s not to say that you can’t market using these tools — you can — but if you lead with it, you’re going to fail. The importance and influence of community is the lesson I hope I’ve brought to the auto industry (or at least GM!).
It’s a fact that the American-based companies have largely closed the quality gap of the previous generation; at this point in the industry, while the products aren’t purely a “commodity,” there’s certainly less differentiation in terms of quality or performance than ever before. So for the automakers that do the best job of building up communities of its customers, enthusiasts, and people we’d like to sell to, that’s where we differentiate from the competition. Who can make their customers feel most appreciated? Who makes their critics feel most listened to? In a business where people go four to six years between purchases, which company does the best job of keeping up contact and emotionally investing its customers in their brand during the years between purchases? That happens through community building, and I’d like to think we’ve done a much better job in the past couple of years of deepening our connections to existing customers, and reaching out to those we didn’t win over last time but might the next time they buy.
