Innovators in Social Media

(page 2 of 2)

When Ford came looking last year for a social media maven, Scott Monty had an answer for the auto giant: No. Monty, a consultant in Joseph Jaffe's Crayon consulting company, had been living in Boston for 20 years. He got to work with lots of blue-chip clients, from Coca-Cola (KO) to American Airlines (AMR). Why move to work inside an auto company—in Detroit?

Then he started thinking. "Here was one of the most storied brands in American culture asking me to do what I liked doing specifically for them, and I said no. I'm still shaking my head about that." When he reconnected with Ford, he said yes—and since July, Monty has been busy on blogs, on Twitter, and in the hallways of Ford trying to revive the culture of a suffering industrial giant. His boss, Chief Executive Alan Mullaly, compares the transformation of Ford to "changing the tires on a car going 60 miles per hour."

Monty's challenge, as he sees it, is to communicate to the rest of the world the same lesson that he learned himself: that Ford is not a stodgy company tied to the past. "I realized that I'd fallen victim to the very thing that Ford was trying to combat," he says. "There were assumptions I'd made that just weren't true anymore. These are the things I struggle with every day. We've got a big perception problem to overcome."

His first goal is to "humanize the brand, giving Ford as many faces as possible." The most prominent face, of course, is Mulally himself, who appears to be a willing experimenter. Last month at the Detroit auto show, Monty says, he collared the CEO coming out of a meeting and asked if he would answer some questions on Twitter.

"What's Twitter?" Mulally asked.

After Monty explained, he asked his followers on Twitter for questions for the Ford CEO. Mulally stayed with him and gamely answered a few. (True, there's no sign of him yet on Twitter, but that could be a good thing: The guy is dealing with 2008 annual losses of $14.6 billion, and sales that fell 40% in January.)

Monty says he wants to "democratize social media" within Ford, deputizing tens of thousands of employees to represent the company. They have blogs, of course, and have reached out to all tech and green bloggers. But the challenge is less about technology, Monty says, than changing the culture of an organization, making it so that people aren't afraid to speak up. "It's like being at a dinner party," Monty says. "If someone says something derogatory about Ford, do you just sit there? No, you respond."

Eyes to the World: Beth Kanter's prolific fundraising

Crowdstrapper: Landlord Eric Brown tunes in

Toolmaster: Noah Brier and his new social-media apps

Baker is a senior writer for BusinessWeek in New York .

Business Exchange

Track and share business topics across the Web.