• by Karl Greenberg , March 2, 2010

Ford has tapped 40 people to participate in the second phase of its Fiesta Movement campaign, a social-media effort begun last year to drive awareness of the U.S. version of the Ford Fiesta compact car, which goes on sale this summer.

While the first program had participants blogging about their experiences with the car for a series of assignments from Ford Motor, the second program -- involving 20 teams of two agents each -- will have participants developing local-market activity around the car.

Connie Fontaine, Ford brand content and alliances manager, explains to Marketing Daily that social media is still a big part of the second chapter of the program, but that there will be more emphasis on marketing the car in the agents' communities, since the effort runs at least until the vehicle's official U.S. launch early this summer. Markets include Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Detroit, Philadelphia, Boston, Denver, San Diego, Dallas, Houston, Seattle, Orlando, Phoenix, Atlanta and Miami.

Fontaine says the people recruited as agents are local-market entrepreneurs, artists, musicians and other creative types with local connections. "These are people who are working in the creative community in areas like Web design, graphic design -- musicians, architects. In Detroit, it's someone who co-owns a photography and video-art house. His partner is not only a renowned photographer but also owner of a Detroit clothing store, so it's a cool mix of people. But they are alike in the sense that that they are connected to the creative community in their cities."

Each team will get four "missions" related to their respective areas of expertise. "It might be something like creating a map on a wall-scape that highlights the city's hot spots, that allows the community to interact with it by, say, texting to create a conversation -- a following -- that allows for an event around the Fiesta's unveiling [in that city]," she says.

After completing a challenge, agents will place the creative content on www.fiestamovement.com, with public opinion about the agents' work determining the best content, which will get national exposure. "There may be opportunities to showcase the work nationally in cinemas and music festivals," says Fontaine. "That's what we have in our sights." But she says the core of the program is local activity. "It will still have a consumer-to-consumer feel, and it's still all about them telling the story instead of us," she says. "The difference is it's closer to launch, so now it's time to drive consideration and reservations."

Ford says the first program generated 6.2 million YouTube views, over 750,000 Flickr views and about 4 million Twitter impressions. The company says that it has gotten 6,000 reservations for the Fiesta, and about 100,000 hand-raisers. Ford says about half of the reservations are conquests (people who were not Ford customers before.)