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Unveiling 2.0
Automobile debuts are going increasingly high tech. It used to be that they were great photo opportunities for the automotive press at car shows and the rest of us had to wait until the car mags published the pictures, but with new technology and social media, they’ve really morphed into so much more.
Take the shining example that was the Tesla Model S unveiling. They could have settled for pulling the cover off in front of a fully-loaded crowd at the New York Auto Show like a number of other manufacturers are planning to do. But they chose not to. Instead they really went much further to unveil this ground-breaking electric sedan.
They started by purposely leaking a photo about a month before the official unveiling. But not a clear photo – one that obscures many of the integral details of the vehicle’s design, leaving many blogs and media sources to speculate on what the uncovered car may look like. Here’s the photo they leaked:
The buzz this created was immense. Automotive and technology media covered it in droves, bloggers wrote countless posts about it, and there were thousands of mentions on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. The seed had been planted, and the public wanted more.
About a week before the actual unveiling was scheduled to take place, Tesla and another popular automotive media outlet, Left Lane News, announced that they’d be live streaming the unveiling of the Model S through the Left Lane News site in cooperation with UStream. That meant that although normal folks like you and me across the world weren’t invited to the swanky launch event (reserved for media, investors and the like), we could see all the action as it unfolded.
As an added bonus, on the day of the scheduled unveiling, one of the web’s biggest influencers, Kevin Rose (who is also an investor, which is why he had access to the photos) leaked a press photo of the Model S in his Flickr stream—Whoops. While some might look at this as a negative for Tesla, it was really quite the opposite. It instantly reignited the buzz and got the world once again pumped for what would happen just a few hours later. Whether it was planned or not, it was a brilliant turn of events.
In the course of this unveiling, Tesla took advantage of the power of the internet, technology and social media channels to make sure that potential buyers all over the world were truly chomping at the bit to see the car in all its glory. As a result of their efforts, they took an astonishing 520 “reservations” in the first week alone, which at $5,000 a pop means they raked in $2,600,000 in working capital. Not bad, especially when you consider that production is still several years away (2012) and the company doesn’t even have the infrastructure in place to produce the vehicle. Want to reserve yours? Click HERE.
While I really enjoyed and appreciated most of the elements of this effort, I did notice a couple of things that I would have liked to address had I been managing the debut. For one, I was very surprised to see such a high-technology company have so many technology issues with the video stream during the live unveiling. The video stream actually failed just before the cover was taken off the vehicle and even when it came back, the video quality was very poor and the sound perhaps even worse. I wonder, too, why they didn’t make the stream available through a microsite or a section on their own website - instead choosing to go through a third-party. That said, I do recognize the value of also having it on third-party sites like Left Lane News that already get tons of built in traffic.
I was also a little stumped as to why Tesla didn’t utilize their Twitter presence to promote the unveiling. Their account, with nearly 8,000 followers, has been idle since November 12th, 2008. Had they been continuing to engage potentail consumers through Twitter, there could have been significantly more interest in the unveiling. Now that they have a $50,000 vehicle, engagement with consumers through social media is perhaps more important than ever…
Tesla, if you’re listening, nice job. Maybe next time we can help? We’ve been there, done that a few times and would love to show you what we could bring to the table. ; )
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