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GM Media Online is the central hub of a powerful storytelling machine driven by internal story “miners.” The site has seen a marked increase in traffic in 2010 and 2011 (see graphic for specific results). Image courtesy of Weber Shandwick
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Company: General Motors
Agency: Weber Shandwick
Timeframe: January 2010 - Present
When the new General Motors began operations in the wake of its 2009 bailout by the federal government with a new business model and leadership team, it faced a highly charged and mostly negative media environment fraught with criticism as a result of the federal assistance.
Realizing that it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to alter the perception of GM among industry media and consumers in the near term, GM and Weber Shandwick devised a new centralized news and storytelling approach for 2010—the GM News Bureau—that would focus on telling positive stories about GM’s four remaining brands after bankruptcy: Chevrolet, Buick, GMC and Cadillac.
RESEARCH
As part of the planning process, key targets and audiences were identified as employees, media, bloggers, auto purchase influencers and general consumers. Each News Bureau story would need to be a positive product story and be viable with different audiences to influence the perception of GM’s brands and vehicles.
PROMOTING PRIDE
The News Bureau team would concentrate almost entirely on brand product stories, while emphasizing the positive attributes of the “New GM” as a company that designs, builds and sells the best vehicles in the world.
“We wanted to portray a General Motors that America could be proud of,” says Stan Stein, Weber Shandwick’s global account director for General Motors. “We tried to shift the focus from the financial pages to the great products that GM had been producing and was in the process of launching—which would narrow the perception gap on quality.”
After a full month spent staffing and ironing out processes and procedures, a team of 20 communications pros from Weber Shandwick and GM—which expanded like an accordion when necessary, says Stein—was primed for an official kickoff on Jan. 1, 2010.
TWO-WAY FLOW
To pair positive storytelling with proactive media outreach, one team focused on mining compelling internal stories, while a second team focused on pitching stories to major media every day.
“There are lots of story requests from the media on GM, but what we really wanted to do was accelerate—in a very dramatic basis—the amount of outreach being conducted and to find the hidden stories that a company the size of GM has,” says Stein. To do so, five Weber Shandwick story miners were embedded across the four GM brands, as well as its Advanced Technology Group. To guide storytelling and ensure media activities were consistently on message, each story had to support at least one of four communications pillars:
1. Specific vehicle stories showing GM was once again building some of the best vehicles in the world.
2. Stories showing that GM was concentrating on building its four remaining brands.
3. Corporate stories to help build reputation and trust as the GM brand recovered.
4. Stories focusing on GM’s employee engagement to help the business recover and sell more vehicles.
DIGGING FOR GOLD
Story miners in each division were assigned to uncover those hidden nuggets and increase the volume of a two-way flow.
They were to spend their days looking for story opportunities by meeting with engineers and designers—in the hallways if they had to—to produce a human interest angle, a quirky product feature angle or something someone overlooked, says Stein. “Their job was to use their expertise to identify and produce newsworthy stories with great content, interesting video, visuals and compelling quotes that someone inside the company didn’t have the time to do, or frankly didn’t recognize as being terribly newsworthy.” (See sidebar for tips on extracting internal stories.)
EXTERNAL PITCHING
For each story, content and assets were loaded to the media site (media.gm.com). Outreach was targeted to traditional and online outlets within tier 1 national, business, consumer, technology, green and auto segments.
GM has historically been good at telling its story to the automotive press, says Stein, and what Weber Shandwick brought to the party was telling the stories in other ways, and in topic categories that one wouldn’t necessarily think of, like advanced technology and business features. “The members of the pitch team were also working on behalf of other clients, so if they’re talking to the USA Today, they can figure out whether someone’s interested in something on the automotive side, or other angles which we can fit,” says Stein.
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Paralleling General Motors’ brand resurgence after emerging from bankruptcy, its media Web site, GM Media Online, experienced near 100% increases in unique visitors, total site visits and total page views from 2009 to 2010. Source: Weber Shandwick |
A CENTRAL HUB
The GM media site served as a hub for all media activity and housed all stories, content and assets for media.
“There used to be this concept of news releases as part of a vacuum—you’d prepare a release, put it out on PR Newswire and wipe your hands of it—but it doesn’t work like that anymore,” says Alan Adler, manager of General Motors News Bureau. “We’ve become the definitive source for GM news—in terms of where people go and reporters go when they’re looking for something on GM, they now come to us.”
Adler says that from a company standpoint, GM now has in place a robust and meaningful way to communicate its messages at all times across all platforms—video, photos, audio and text.
BIZ OBJECTIVES MATTER
Adler doesn’t lose sight of the bottom line, which is pretty clear cut in GM’s case. “As good as the stories may look and read, if you’re not selling cars and trucks you’re not doing anything,” says Adler. “GM’s smart people design and produce amazing technology and innovative products, and I think explaining why, when applied to a vehicle, these innovations make life better for you, Mr. or Mrs. car buyer, is a win.” says Adler.
PAY DIRT STRUCK
Daily story mining, aggressive media relations and GM’s media hub proved to be a powerful storytelling machine that strongly complemented GM’s ongoing product revival. Stein notes that, if given a second chance, the team would have put a greater emphasis on video storytelling early on, and has since recognized the importance that graphics, art, photos and video have had in magnifying each story, and has adapted accordingly. Results for 2010 were impressive nonetheless, including:
• Story Mining Goal: 100 “stories” mined. Result: 211 stories mined (211% of goal).
• Media Goals for News Operations: 6,000 media touches; 12,000 placements/reposts; 5 billion estimated audience. Results: 21,394 media touches (356% of goal); 45,147 placements/reposts (376% of goal); 14,872,225,800 estimated audience (296% of goal).
Other results include:
• Individual Brand Growth: Cadillac —fastest-growing luxury brand in the U.S; Buick —fastest growing major brand in U.S.
• Sales growth of core brands up 21%; four straight profitable quarters in 2010, earning more than $4.7 billion.
• Readership numbers for GM’s media site up 97.5% (996,044 visitors in 2010)
• News Bureau stories were more positive than industry averages, helping offset negative coverage.
CHALLENGE OF SCALE
Stein says the greatest campaign challenge was keeping internal communications channels open and flowing. “For a company the size of GM to suddenly put a media team with story miners into each brand and division, everyone had a little paradigm shift across their media departments, brands, regions and various agencies,” says Stein, who adds that each function worked hard to communicate possible stories to the miners daily.
The News Bureau is still operating full steam and going global: GM and Weber Shandwick are now conducting similar efforts based off this blueprint in Canada, in eight European countries and in parts of Asia. PRN
CONTACT:
Stan Stein, [email protected]; Alan Adler, [email protected]; Elizabeth Doty, Elizabeth Doty, [email protected].