Car Makers Take Case to the Web – WSJ.com
Faced with an unprecedented financial crisis, automakers are taking to the Web. Embattled car c ompanies say word-of-mouth marketing and search performance are inexpensive ways to reach interested people and route their messages around the media that, they believe, doesn’t give them a fair shake. General Motors has GM Facts and Fiction and Ford has The Ford Story. Could crisis be a turning point in digital influence?

How to Get the Most Out of Google Maps
A great page about how to use Google Maps and the multitude of plug-ins that work with the service.

8 Essential Free Social Media Monitoring Tools
Great lineup of stuff I had never heard of before! More tools to monitor your brand/products/self in social media space.

Social Media Case Studies SUPERLIST- 17 Extensive Lists of Organizations Using Social Media
List of lists of social media case studies. Save time by starting here.

Power.com: One Ring to Rule All Social Networks?
The company is coming out of stealth mode with five million users and the promise of aggregating all your social networks into one. But can it navigate a maze of technical, privacy and competitive hurdles to become the uber-social network?

Not ye olde banners
The Economist boldly predicts that online advertising will fare much better in this recession than in the last one. One reason is that the ad landscape prior to 2001 was mostly banners, while today’s ad programs are more sophisticated. Another is that online advertising is erasing distinctions “above the line” (branding) and “below the line” (incentives & offers) spending. Finally, user traffic is moving to social media sites, which have low ad rates. This could present an opportunity for marketers, at least in the short term.

Parkay Could Have Used Social Media To, Well, Pass The Parkay
Parkay had a great opportunity to turn the revival of its “talking tub” campaign into a word-of-mouth phenomenon. So why didn’t it do more with the opportunity?

MicroPR
Writers looking resources or help with a story just send a tweet with their request to @micropr (twitter.com/micropr) · PR professionals following the MicroPR feed will see a writer’s request and respond directly via the writer’s preferred channel · The media is also able to block PR people who do not follow the preferred contact model, etc. Here is an article on Brian’s blog explaining the service in more detail.

WordPress Automatic upgrade
I run five different websites on WordPress, which makes upgrading to the latest version of the software an ordeal at times. WordPress’ frequent upgrades can also be a little scary. I’ve had several cases of upgrades going wrong and sites disappearing, which forced me to roll back. One of my sites hasn’t been upgraded in a year because of this problem. So I was delighted to find the WordPress Automatic upgrade plugin. It steps you through the process of making backups, deactivating plugins, installing the upgrade, reactivating plugins and cleaning up the database. You just click a link for each stage. I’ve upgraded four WordPress-based sites now without a hitch. Strongly recommended!

Google empowers users to edit search results
“Hoping to give its search engine a more personal touch, Google now lets users reshuffle results so their favorite Web sites get top billing and disliked destinations get discarded the next time they enter the same request.”

Commercial Break – Revisiting the Chevy Apprentice Campaign
GM’s famous 2006 Chevy Apprentice user-generated advertising campaign has long been regarded as a failure because of the disruptions caused by environmentalist critics. Now Wired challenges that conventional wisdom by documenting the big jump in Tahoe sales following the campaign. This experiment wasn’t a failure; it was a huge success. Which just goes to show that negativity isn’t always such a bad thing. Quoting:

Once Tahoe-bashers discovered that Chevy had handed them a bully pulpit, they quickly went to work, posting attack ads on the Chevy site and spreading them to YouTube and other outlets. It didn’t take long for bloggers and reporters to realize that something weird was going on over at Chevyapprentice.com. At first, everyone assumed it was just another case of a big corporation not “getting it” about the Internet. Then, when the ads weren’t yanked down immediately, they figured Chevy was too clueless even to notice what was happening on its own site. Only gradually did it dawn on people that Chevy had no intention of removing the attack ads.

By any objective measure, the Tahoe Apprentice campaign has to be judged a success. The microsite attracted 629,000 visitors by the time the contest winner, Michael Thrams from nearby Ann Arbor, was announced at the end of April. On average, those visitors spent more than nine minutes on the site, and nearly two-thirds of them went on to visit Chevy.com; for three weeks running, Chevyapprentice.com funneled more people to the Chevy site than either Google or Yahoo did. Once there, many requested info or left a cookie trail to dealers’ sites.

Sales took off too, even though it was spring and SUV purchases generally peak in late fall. Since its introduction in January, the new Tahoe has accounted for more than a quarter of all full-size SUVs sold, outpacing its nearest competitor, the Ford Expedition, 2 to 1. In March, the month the campaign began, its market share hit nearly 30 percent. By April, according to auto-information service Edmonds, the average Tahoe was selling in only 46 days – quite a change from the year before, when models languished on dealers’ lots for close to four months