General Motors Launches Social Media Newsroom

Well, it’s actually GM Europe, but that’s still HUGE.

Check it out – GM got a lot of things right with this effort.

The newsroom contains a tagcloud that enables the visitor to re-orient the newsroom content by keyword (e.g., click on the “environment” tag and all the releases about GM’s green initiatives show up instantly, by issue date).

There’s a sweet Flickr page with a lot of gorgeous photography. Not just brochureware of pretty cars (and pretty girls), but also of behind-the-scenes action and motorway candids like this one:

Importantly, the Company is allowing end-users to comment (and trackback) to each news release as if it were a blog post. You can also save/share each news release using all the usual-suspects like del.icio.us, digg, et al.

There’s even a YouTube page that looks like it gets a fair amount of traffic. For example, this video of the new Saab 9–3 has seen almost 5,000 views.

Lastly, while I give GM Europe kudos for creating a del.icio.us page of their own (with almost 150 entries to-date), I think they are missing a chance to offer up a “daily dose of thought leadership” by leaving these bookmarks essentially blank. It would be nice to see GM’s official response/opinion about each of these saved stories.

But that’s a minor quibble. As noted on the Ignite Social Media Blog, “The site does an amazing thing - it welcomes comments and conversation while allowing users to take any of it and republish. It clearly understands that the destination of the conversations will likely be covered elsewhere, and allows the tools to do so.”

Continue reading here: Facebook: Wrong Way to Engage in a Conversation

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