Chevrolet Surfaces At SXSW For Push Into Social Media

There were a few good reasons why Chevrolet and General Motors’ other surviving brands admittedly came late to the social-media table. There was that bankruptcy thing last year, and the worst sales environment in decades. And when GM first began sniffing around online networks a few years ago, it began at the corporate level.

But now Chevrolet is leading GM into a determined new surge in social media, and the brand’s coming-out party is going to be its heavy participation in South by Southwest, one of the nation’s largest and most influential interactive conferences. Chevy will be asking SXSW attendees in Austin, Texas, to help it evaluate three emerging applications.

“Now things are getting better [for GM] so it’s time to become proactive” in the space, Christopher Barger, GM’s director of social media, told brandchannel. “We’ve had a strong presence as GM in online networks, but now it’s time to really build up our brand presences more than our corporate presence."

So Chevrolet will be asking the social-media aficionados at SXSW to evaluate a new location-based social-networking application that it developed with Gowala. The brand will use Quick Response codes to introduce attendees to the key features of vehicles such as the Volt and Cruze, and will be beta testing an application called Chevrolet iReaveal which will “unlock” three-dimensional models of its vehicles.

“The practitioners who come to this show know the technologies better than we do, so it’s a great opportunity to learn,” Barger said.