Chevy's brilliant road trip to South by Southwest Conference

After a rather tumultuous time for American car makers, Chevy is doing something to engage the buzz makers of our time. And they're doing a rather good job of it. The annual South by Southwest(SXSW) conference is being held this month. It's an conference of innovation in interactive, music and film. It was at this conference that innovations like Twitter and FourSquare have been introduced in the past.

Leading up the interactive portion of the conference, Chevy is sponsoring road trips from eight different parts of the country to SXSW. They are providing the car and having a four[person team from each city's social media scene drive it to the conference. Along the way, they must complete as many of 50 challenges as they can, which were crowd-sourced out to the followings of each team. The Chevy social media team, headed by Chris Barger, then chose the 50 challenges from all those submitted. (They didn't use my "find a ugly bug from each state" suggestion - but then that would be hard here in Michigan). Each team also get points for how much their social media communities interact with them along the way. The prize for the winning team is that Chevy with throw an "epic tweetup" in the winner's city for their social media community. How much good will and online buzz is Chevy creating from this one social media promotion? It's huge. And it's spearheaded by the leaders in each community, the early adopters with lots of followers. I think it's a brilliant way to get your product and brand name out there and generate positive feelings.

I've been following Team Detroit all day today, which is the first day of the road trip. I'm friends with three of the four members of the team, through various local social media functions. They're all great people and are making following them a lot of fun. They've had a steady stream of photos, videos, tweets, Facebook comments, blogs and more as they've gone. The local community has responded with comments, retweets and more on a large scale. Now, maybe it's not like that in all the team's cities (last I looked Team Detroit had a commanding lead), but the buzz is pretty great. You can follow Team Detroit on the Twitter hashtag #DETChevySXSW or on Facebook. It's fun. I'd recommend it. But, in the end, I think it's Chevy who's the real winner.

Mike McClure, Exec Creative Director & Social Media Guy

Comments

[Nikki Stephan]

Great post, Mike! Supporters like you make our community amazing. Can't wait to win the Chevy Tweetup!

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=712406420]

Well I am heckling the night crowd about joining our side of the block. They were wanting to join the Chicago and I mentioned us. Should be a fun week. I need to write a blog post myself about it. I am already uber tweeting about it.

[Mike McClure]

Thank you, Nikki for your kind words. Can't wait to win, either!

And yes, Jamie, I'm finding myself a little obsessed with following them, too. A lot of fun! Look forward to your post