Media

GM employees and visitors watch a the GM 100-year celebration on a large video monitor outside the GM world headquarters at the Renaissance Center in Detroit

As part of GM’s centennial, we launched GMnext nine months ago as a springboard for conversation about the future of transportation and GM’s intended role in helping to shape that future. In many ways, the GMnext program was a social media laboratory for us, and we’ve learned a great deal about how a big company like GM can help encourage communications both with consumers and among consumers through videos, online chats, blogs and our Generations of GM Wiki — our digital scrapbook that tells our history.

As the guy who was charged with the oversight of this program, it’s been fascinating to watch the learning curve, and even watch our own executives (those who weren’t already engaged in Fastlane) learn how to deal with a social media landscape where the primary function is engaging audiences and spurring conversation, not necessarily controlling messages.

All in all, I think we mostly achieved what we set out to do: prompt conversations and interest in the future of transportation. More than 11,000 comments about our content were posted on our site and other online outlets where our content lives. Our original videos that gave folks a “behind the scenes” look at GM and its employees were among the most successful aspects of the program . . . these videos were viewed more than 4 million times. More than a million people visited the GMnext.com Web site. We have more than 855 million impressions globally and are still counting. And while the conversations took place in large part off of GMnext.com, we think that’s OK.

Another thing we reconfirmed is that people are still flat-out car crazy worldwide — especially for upcoming vehicles. Thousands of you visited GMnext.com to watch the reveal of the 2010 Chevy Camaro, and our videos on the Corvette ZR1 have been seen 2.2 million times by enthusiasts around the world.

This passion for upcoming vehicles reached its apex on 16 September 2008, when we revealed the production model of the Chevrolet Volt during our Global Broadcast. The response to the vehicle has been overwhelming and I want to thank all of you for joining us on that historic day for the company.

So what is next for GMnext? First of all, folks will still have access to GMnext content as much of the content will be housed on GM.com. GMnext.com will become a landing page for many of GM’s online assets, including our Fastlane and FYI blogs. The Generations of GM Wiki will live on and I encourage you to continue submitting your stories, photos and videos.

We’ll take the lessons learned from GMnext and use them to better communicate with you on our vehicles, our programs and our newest advancements. Please continue submitting your questions and comments to our sites.

It’s been a great ride, I thank you for your attention and interest. The next few years should be very, very interesting.

Bill O’Neill
GM Executive Director of Communications Operations


Check out the introductory video that gives some insights into the "next century" of GM corporate leadership. This video was shared with employees in late 2007 in preparation for the centennial year, and also served as the introduction to the official media kick-off of the GMnext online community.

Video Courtesy of General Motors Corporation

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