Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks II

After posting Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks, I came across the new book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.

Authors Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff (Forrester Research) offer practical, data-based strategies for companies that want to harness the power of social technologies like blogs, social networks, and YouTube.

They offer a downloadable excerpt in PDF and many other resources based on the content of the report.

They define groundswell as:

A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.

But what caught my eye was the following story, excerpted from the excerpt:

Bob [Lutz] is in his seventies. He’s toiled for the auto industry since his early thirties. (Before that, he was a fighter pilot.) He’s worked for Ford; he’s worked for Chrysler, where he was on the board of directors; and he joined GM in 2001, as vice chairman for product development.

Toward the end of 2004, three years into Bob’s tenure at GM, things were going poorly. The stock was in free fall. Customers weren’t warming to the new product lines, and neither were the auto critics who traditionally make pronouncements on what’s hot in the auto business.

Bob—one of GM’s best communicators, a dynamic, articulate leader who is passionate about products—wasn’t getting his message across.

Bob needed a way to speak directly to the people who were still open to GM’s message. So as the auto show approached in January 2005, he decided he wasn’t too old—and GM wasn’t too stodgy—to try something new. Bob started a blog called FastLane (you can read it at fastlane.gmblogs.com).Time from decision to launch: three weeks. Pretty amazing for an old-line Detroit automaker.

The first entries were a bit stiff—not at all like most of the bloggers out there. But Bob’s first post got 121 comments from readers. People wanted to hear what GM was saying.

Within a few weeks, Bob was off and running, penning posts with titles like “Quick Missive from The Show Floor” and “Best in Class? Taste for Yourself.” This guy was born to blog. He just needed the technology to catch up with his innate desire to communicate. Here’s how he put it, just four months after starting the blog:

What began as an experiment has become an important means of communication for GM. It has given me, personally, an opportunity to get much closer with you, the public. Often, I find your comments insightful and compelling. At times your criticism is harsh. But the fact that you have remained interested and continue to have faith in our efforts to develop great products is a worthy motivator.

FastLane hasn’t revolutionized GM. It hasn’t changed the competitive dynamics with Japanese automakers or turned the auto industry’s troublesome dealer channel into pussycats. But it has revolutionized the way GM communicates. GM no longer needs to be concerned that auto industry trade magazines and expensive TV commercials are the only way to communicate with customers, dealers, employees, and investors—it has a direct channel. Searches on Google for items like “Chevrolet Volt” lead readers directly to the appropriate blog post in the first page of results. GM can now react quickly to news items, criticisms, and even recalls without seeming petty. It can float test balloons about new car ideas and see what the reaction is. And even better, every posting gets hundreds of comments, which generate new ideas for the company.

That’s groundswell thinking in action.

If Bob Lutz can join the groundswell, so can you.

Here's a video with the authors -- more on the Groundswell site and YouTube.