ISSUE 255 : Wednesday, July 21, 2009

How do you get the attention of the world’s largest company? What does it take to get them to pay attention to your puny little squeek? Well traditionally, you would write a letter to some form of “customer relations” person, send it off, and wait for the form letter in the return mail. All in all about a 90-day round trip. And not a lot of satisfaction forthcoming.

But all of a sudden, corporate America got religion. Now, being in touch is a big deal. Corporate bloggers have been overridden by corporate Tweetsters. Marketing Directors are taking their leads from Social Media Directors. And C-level executives of every stripe are penning blogs, doing webchats and like Fritz Henderson of General Motors, answering their own extended form of Twitter (255 characters).

The classic Ivory Tower has proven itself to be a non-starter in more and more executive suites. The end result is supposed to be a new “openness” and “transparency” to communications between companies and their customer base. At least that’s what it says here in the latest press release.

Well sometimes it doesn’t quite work out that way. Last week, our number one prospect, Mr. Bob Lutz, used his blog to make a statement about his plans to migrate a Pontiac G8 from Australia into a new Chevy Caprice. GM CEO Fritz Henderson reversed that. The reversal wasn’t the big news. The big news was the “transparent” musings of GM’s top marketing guy, cut down by the transparent “Oh-no-he-didn’t” by his boss, all within 24 hours. And the more than 200 comments loged by GM “fans” logged into the GM blog at http://fastlane.gmblogs.com .

“Fast Lane is right. But that’s not the end of it. Fritz Henderson, not to be out-blogged, intro’d yet a faster micro-blog called “Tell Fritz” which invited folks to send him direct messages which he promised to read and respond to every day.

Now normally, this would be a big yawn and a guaranteed “So what?” Unless you had something you wanted to get in front of top management at GM without going through the rank and protocol of dozens of levels of people at GM who say “no” for a living. Like getting their attention for efforts like http://WeOwnGM.com and http://GeniusMatters.com . What we have been given is a direct pipeline to Mr. One and Mr. Two for our deployment of an endless stream of different benefits to GM for supporting one or both of these programs. I’m saying this is a big breakthrough for people in the ideation business. Get the right idea to the right person and you are on your way.

As Woody Allen said, "50% of success is just being able to make contact."