Sync® from Ford: Live + online for a 360° marketing experience

There’s been plenty of talk about how to create a true social marketing that would leverage events with the web and connect to traditional leads. In recent workshop I attended, Connie Fontaine, manager of experiential and multi-cultural communications at Ford Motor Company, showed how it can actually be done.

The brand is Sync, a feature created by a partnership of Ford with Microsoft. It lets a Ford driver control the radio, phone, and MP3 components with vocalized commands. (read more about it at http://www.syncmyride.com)

Connie described a rather engrossing ethnic networking/social media/viral crusade featuring young teen friends, Kim and Seana. They crossed the country performing and delivered videos of their adventures along the way. While the webisodes may have seemed somewhat scripted, the women were real. In fact, Connie surprised the group at the end of her talk by having Kim, the singer/songwriter of the pair, perform a song live. While it might be a tough crowd – more than a hundred marketers in a conference room – she proved herself to be a genuine buzz-builder. (see more about it at http://syncmymusic.msn.com/)





This allowed Connie to summarize the Ford Sync approach to engaging and connecting the events to lead-generation:
• Act different…Have fun!
• Be relevant…What do people want? Where?
• Be entertaining
• Be vital, integral part of plan


If you are thinking about live + online for a 360° marketing experience, what are the potential applications for health, science, and technology marketers?

When you develop an event with Stinson Brand Innovation, your team can integrate both live and online media to meet your objectives. We consider how tactics can be connected from branded events to social networking to lead generation.