Fiesta Movement was a social media effort designed to extrapolate the power of a few influentials onto a larger audience in order to build brand awareness and engagement in the 18 months prior to the launch of the Ford Fiesta in America. Specifically created to engage customers in a forum they were already utilising, the Fiesta Movement used a bespoke algorithm to identify those 100 social media influencers that would provide the best ROI. Dubbed 'Fiesta Agents,' these influencers were given a vehicle, gas, and one monthly task to complete (a themed 'mission' that resulted in a video 0being posted on fiestamovement.com) for six months.

With no traditional media dollars spent, the campaign wasn’t launched so much as 'released into the wild.' During a press conference at the North American International Auto Show in January of 2009, Ford CEO Alan Mulally issued an invitation for consumers to apply for Agent-hood. Over 4,000 consumers responded to that one call to action. After Agent selection was complete, Agents were brought together for a Briefing/Vehicle Handover, and given their first Mission. It began immediately – agents began Tweeting, Facebooking, Flickr’ing, MySpacing and generally talking online before they left. Throughout the course of the Movement, Agents themselves arranged to be profiled on local news channels, got themselves into local city magazine social pages and continued to feed their online audiences with fresh content.

After two full quarters in-market, latest metrics showed Brand Familiarity of Fiesta at 58% among Segment 0(people who intend to buy a car of Fiesta’s ilk.) With a segment familiarity average of 57%, this meant we’d met our goal of becoming competitive in the segment. While one point above average may seem like a funny thing to brag about, bear in mind that this car is not even available for sale. That familiarity came from the efforts of only ONE HUNDRED influencers, and with no incremental media. Additionally, the agents created over 50,000 pieces of original content, 6.5 million YouTube views, 4 million impressions on Twitter, 300 million consumer engagements, and garnered 50,000 hand raisers...and counting.