Thoughts on BMW’s Auto Africa Blog

Scott Gray, a fellow wannabe geek and pseudo-techie employed at BMW, sent me an IM a week or so back with a link to www.bmwautoafrica.co.za – the ‘official blog of BMW South Africa at Auto Africa 2006‘.

Scott has been doing some awesome stuff at BMW since joining them as online media manager interactive marketing manager (sorry Scott), including stepping out as one of the first companies to advertise on a South African blog – in this case the choice was Cherryflava – arguably South Africa’s most progressive branding and advertising commentary.


BMWblog

The blog, designed to host vodcasts (as they call them – video podcasts) around the BMW presence at the expo, is probably Scott’s most ambitious venture yet. He decided to open up comments to (what is typically) a very critical public. In our quick IM discussion around the site we debated the pros and cons of opening comments on a blog of this nature – a blog so inextricably linked to a powerful brand, that is. One runs the risk of soliciting a whole range of negative feedback. One can choose to moderate this feedback but is it then truly transparent? That said, if the message of the blog comes through – that BMW really does give a damn about what it’s clients think and how they experience the brand, good or bad, it’s a really success.

Scott chose the open source blogging platform WordPress as an engine. The theme is a modified K2 (with a custom header). Other than the header which is agency designed, Scott put together the entire site from scratch, which in itself is a testimony to how easy it can be to put together a top notch corporate blog with a little initiative and time.

He’s also done well to keep the video podcasts short, considering the vast majority of South African internet users haven’t got access to ADSL, or shoddy ADSL at best.

Scott did receive some pretty challenging responses on the blog – comments from a number of people who attended the show saying the stand was disappointing. As I understand it, BMW had opted for less cars on the stand and brought in three progressive, cutting edge models that are making industry headlines right now. Other manufacturers Mercedes, Audi, Aston Martin (I’m just mentioning the names that were compared on the blog) had bigger stands and more cars. I understand BMW’s approach but I guess my argument against their opting for a small stand is my experience of a narrow-minded ‘bigger is better’ vehicle market. Unfortunately these guys are not all connoisseurs. However, that said, some of the feedback was really valid. One reader asked that their be more experts – engineers and designers – on the stand next time so that they could have a conversation with a human about the cars they love.

My advice to Scott – capitalise on the information your blog aggregated. Contact each of the people who posted (I think you have their mail addresses?) and invite them to a day of advanced driving and a chat with your marketing director about ways to improve for next time. As for feedback around your other marketing (including more traditional) avenues. Keep the blog open. Keep videocasting. Stop BMW drivers in the street or in parking lots and ask for feedback on their driving experience. Get BMW drivers to submit videos telling how they love their cars – educate them on how to use Shozu so they can submit video’s straight to a YouTube account tagged with BMW.

Get your hands dirty! But above all, don’t close the blog.

Well done on a brilliant idea and top notch execution, mate.

  • http://chump-style.blogspot.com Wezzo

    Yeah when I first saw the blog, I knew Scott had something to do with it – really cool idea.

    I don’t think they were expecting any negative comments to come through. They should rather have had a suggestion box at the stand than allow for opinion’s to be public. My feeling anyway…

  • http://www.mikestopforth.com Mike

    Hey Wezzo – I don’t think negative comments are bad. Shit, I get negative comments on this blog weekly. The crux is how you DEAL with negative comments. do you get defensive? Do you delete them? Do you crawl into a hole? I hope not.

    You LISTEN – especially as a corporate. Whether people are talking about you online or at home or over the phone or in a podcast or at a street corner, they’re talking. It could be good or bad. Neither is preferential. All you want is honest feedback and strategies for engaging it.

    The suggestion box is dead mate. It’s sooooo 2005. It’s time for companies, individuals, bloggers, whoever to stand up and admit they don’t get it right all the time and BE THANKFUL for honest feedback. Nearly every single negative comment on the BMW blog had some useful info in it and I don’t remember one that was malicious or mocking. Constructive (albeit negative) feedback mechanisms can only lead to better business and competitive advantage.

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  • http://www.bmwautoafrica.co.za scott

    so far it’s been an interesting / exciting / unpleasant / stressful / challenging experiment.

    Regarding the treatment of comments, I set up a list of “filter words” that pull aside anything that’s completely defamatory. So far we’ve moderated only 2 comments, both “unconstructive”, and off the point.

    If there’s nothing matched in the filter, the comment goes live instantaneously. The reason for this is that I believe it’s easier to not publish a comment if you have to moderate each and every one.

    I think that the hardest part of the whole exercise is that our efforts to use the blog as a communication tool to show off our products have been almost completely overshadowed by what most see as a poor effort from BMW at the actual event.

    The big question for me to answer at the end of the day – has the blog accomplished what we wanted it to accomplish?

  • http://www.chilibean.co.za Paul

    I knew that template looked familiar. You can actually see it is the k2 from the search box. I think the blog is a great idea and I think allowing people to comment is a must (just think about the tremendous success of the General Motors blogs). Moderate the comments to keep spam out but don’t be afraid of negative comments, they are opportunities to do something powerful.

    I have two gripes about the site though. Firstly the video looks like it has been shot with a phone with lousy resolution. This is BMW, at least shoot a decent quality video. On that note, what’s with the wmv formatted videos? Yes the file size should be smaller and yes 85% (or whatever the current statistic is) of Internet users use Windows Media Player but what about the rest of us who don’t? Don’t we matter? I must just point out the irony of using a media format that doesn’t embrace, say, Apple users – BMW is one of the car manufacturers that integrates iPod functionality directly into the car’s sound system.

    My advice when it comes to the video is to upload the promo videos to YouTube and embed the players in the blog posts. An alternative is to upload to Google Video and embed Google Video players. At least with Google Video users can download the videos to Mac or PC, iPod or PSP.

  • http://www.chilibean.co.za Paul

    Sorry, one quick correction to my previous comment. The screenshots for the videos are a little misleading. The actual video quality (viewed through Quicktime and a Windows media plugin) is pretty good. I still believe embedding players in the blog posts themselves from YouTube or Google Video is a better option because it keeps visitors on the page rather than diverting visitors not running Windows Media Player to a window in Quicktime or some other stop gap application.

  • http://www.bmwautoafrica.co.za scott

    Hi Paul

    The video issue is possibly the biggest headache I’ve had with this whole experiment.

    Unfortunately, the videos were shot in 16:9 format (an unknown issue until it came to embedding). My intention was to use Youtube as much as possible due to its simple embedding and sharing capabilities… that was until we discovered that Youtube, Google video, and others don’t support widescreen format and simply resize the video into the more common 4:3, which looks extremely bad.

    So we tried to embed the wmv’s which presented its own usability issues such as no progress on the buffering/download.

    On the WMV format, we actually have uploaded mpegs to the same location but the quality difference was negligible but wmv file size was a fraction of mpg.

    If i could do it over again, i’d do 4:3 dimensions and all the other problems would go away (i wish!)!

  • http://www.chilibean.co.za Paul

    Hi Scott

    I didn’t realise video is such a pain. I also didn’t realise YouTube and Google Video are so dumb in some respects. It is a real pity that those services automatically resize the video.

    I guess this shows how many things you need to anticipate to use those services for video. And there I just thought you upload the buggers and, hey presto, you have embedded video.

  • http://chump-style.blogspot.com Wezzo

    Paul, download the Windows Media Player for Mac – might help.

  • http://www.chilibean.co.za Paul

    Wezzo, that is blasphemy! Actually, I have a plugin that allows Quicktime to play Windows Media files.

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