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Mazda USA has one of the more interesting systems for using user generated content as word of mouth advertising out on the internet. If you are selling custom parts or custom car services, what Mazda USA is doing is well worth taking a look at, if you can keep from being distracted by the car culture. Sometimes being distracted by shiny is bad, but in the car culture, shiny in this case can be good.

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I was working with one of my friends last night who has a great idea for a startup, but had no idea what to do after the product was made. They had worked out the entire business model, they had worked out what they needed to insource and outsource, what they were going to make, how they were going to make it, but once the product was sitting on the shipping dock, they had no idea what to do with it. No idea how to sell it, no idea how to build a community around the product.

The product is custom cars, so we talked about what Mazda is doing with people who buy a new car from Mazda. The idea behind the Mazda social networking and sharing web site is that most new car owners are really happy with their car. They take pictures of it and share them with their family, friends, and just about anyone who they can pester into seeing their shiny new car. Over time the use of the personalized web site tapers off, but Mazda then owns most of the material you post, or at the very least has the right to reuse it as they see fit. Terms of Service are great to read by the way, you should read them carefully.

Once Mazda has the information that you posted up, you will share that with your friends and family and create buzz. It might only be 20 people, but then it might be thousands depending on how much you talk about your shiny new car, where it can place in search engines. This is a great way of getting word of mouth about your shiny new Mazda, and creating interest in the brand. The more cool things you do with your web site that Mazda provides, the more people will come, the more people that might buy a Mazda in the future because you are talking about your new car. You are positive, engaged, energized by the shiny new toy.

Mazda pays for the hosting costs, but car owners are an interesting group of people to work with. Much like Gamers, they have their own subculture, their own passions, and their own way of sharing information. Often they don’t mind sharing pictures of their car, what they want to do next with it, how they tricked it out, how they increased performance, and a whole slew of things that they will do to their car. There is no reason that any other car company cannot use the same idea that Mazda has, but I don’t know why other car companies are not doing this. (They might be, I just do not know that they are).

What a great way of getting word of mouth marketing, via a web site, that can tie into RSS readers, other systems, to show how cool the car is, how happy the owners are, in a rinse wash reuse fashion. It does not matter that they only participate for a small moment of internet time, what matters is that at least 2% of all Mazda buyers will likely do this (2% based on the average person who is willing to make their own content and share with the world), with sales of 263,949 that is some 5,279 people who are taking advantage of this. 5,279 free word of mouth happy customers per year on the internet.

Brilliant.

Money cannot buy that kind of advertising, so as we hashed out his post delivery model, and looking at how Mazda uses social networking and leverages the car culture to help raise awareness of their products, he decided that this might not be a bad idea. The non-intrusive, non-abusive way of getting information out by leveraging people’s passion for their cars is a great way of getting attention about your car products. The good part is that all this costs is a simple automated set up script, a user notification letter, servers and bandwidth.

Tags: Mazda, social networking, case study, word of mouth, advertising, interesting