• by Karl Greenberg , October 5, 2010

Honda is launching a month-long social media campaign designed to drive people to its online corporate documentary series, "Dream the Impossible" on Dreams.Honda.com. The program brings bloggers into the mix at Honda's Facebook page and invites public participation in a forum-style setup.

Each week through the first week in November, the company will create a forum around one of the six films comprising the Dream series and the themes around the film. The first week's program -- starting this week -- deals with issues raised by the film, "Racing Against Time."

Five bloggers -- one per day -- are offering their thoughts in environmental, energy, and automotive spaces on Honda's Facebook page, which also houses the films. The five official blog posts in the first week will be at Peak Oil Blues, ChrisMartenson.com, The Oil Drum, Greentech Media and Jetson Green, with each contributor posting thoughts on their respective Web sites which Honda will then highlight each day.

For the following week, the program will deal with the "Dreams vs. Nightmares" film with ExperienceProject.com creating an online environment and succession of topic-related questions surrounding the impact of dreams. A week called "Kick out the Ladder" will feature five written or video contributions from representatives at other organizations on how their corporate philosophy allows for innovation and leads to success.

A week devoted to mobility will involve the Honda community submitting thoughts on what transportation will look like in the year 2088. Honda designers will use an assortment of the community's input as inspiration to create visual sketch representations. The final week's theme is "Failure: The Secret to Success," wherein experts from different backgrounds will offer anecdotes on how their own failures led to success.

"What inspired this is we have had people commenting on our site; there have been a lot comments from consumers, and we just felt we could find new ways to create dialogue," says Barbara Ponce, Honda's corporate advertising manager.

Ponce says the Dream films, which launched last year, were the right platform for blog commentary. "Basically it's taking to social media what the company had already been doing in the films," says Ponce.

Each of the six films elaborate on a theme that directly ties to Honda's own engineering philosophy, with commentary from experts in fields as far-flung as pro skateboarding, screenwriting, academia and within Honda. "But we had never involved bloggers, and hadn't extended it into social media that way," Ponce says. "Where in the films we can only interview a few people, within the blogosphere we can have virtual conversations with millions and millions of people."

The bloggers weren't hired by Honda, according to Ponce. "It's not an endorsement in any way, and sometimes they have perspective we wouldn't necessarily put forth," she says. "It's in the spirit of dialogue."

Honda will launch two more "Dreams" films in the next couple of months, according to Ponce. Like the others they carry themes intended to inform Honda's product development and brand philosophy in some way. Ponce says the first of the two, "Into the Unknown" is about the value of exploration and new ideas and concepts that lead to solutions. "Honda is focused on mobility, it is much broader than just the car, so it really isn't tied to a product launch," says Ponce, adding that Honda will provide media support, "and we are actually integrating it with our presenting sponsorship of National Geographic's 'Great Migration' series."

The Dreams campaign has garnered increases in traffic to the Web site, "and it continues to grow; our proprietary metrics are all showing significant growth improvement in image metrics," Ponce says. "Every time we announce a new film, we bring in new traffic for all of the films because people come to see a new film on the site and they realize there's a library of content; they find topics that appeal to them."