Pontiac driving business through social media

After recently opening a store in Second Life, Pontiac embraces social marketing with a profile page on MySpace for their G5 model. The webpage promotes “Friends with Benefits”, a member-get-member program to encourage G5 buyers to persuade their friends to buy the same car.

Members of the community who have purchased a Pontiac G5 receive $100 MasterCard gift card once the number of members swells to 100, and $1,000 for 1,000.

"We wanted to try something completely different for Pontiac -- empower the users of MySpace to engage each other rather than push information at them," said Mark-Hans Richer, marketing director at Pontiac.

In another social media move, via Yahoo, the brand is launching Pontiac Underground, a website bringing together all Pontiac web communities that use Yahoo’s social media tools, such as fans of GTO’s, G6’s and Firebirds. Users can exchange buying tips, upload photo's of their beloved cars using Flickr, post and view video through Yahoo Video and find out about offline events.

"Pontiac is a very loyal brand--loyal to Pontiac owners and enthusiasts," said Mark Beeching, global executive creative director for Digitas, which developed the site with Pontiac and Yahoo. "So the natural thing ... to do was to aggregate and curate enthusiasts' own content about the brand and the cars--to join the club and share their passions."

Tags: community, MySpace, Pontiac, social marketing, social media, social networking, user-generated, Yahoo