Online Product Reveals: Cutting Edge & Informative

2010 Chevrolet Camaro

GM Rolls Out The Camaro Online

I write extensively about the automotive industry, operating several sites including The Auto Writer which is, by far, my busiest blog. I am by no means a mechanical expert when it comes to cars, but I am an admirer of the technology and engineering that goes into making the vehicles we drive and I like to keep my pulse on this dynamic industry.

Today, General Motors revealed the 2010 Chevrolet Camaro, bringing back a nameplate that the company marketed from 1967-2002.  Fans of the Camaro and its sibling vehicle, the Pontiac Firebird, were bitterly disappointed when GM stopped production in 2002, especially as Ford continued to produce its arch rival pony car, the Mustang.

But, it was that same Mustang which helped resurrect the Camaro. When Ford introduced its latest generation pony car in 2005 to heralded acclaim, both General Motors and Chrysler realized that they needed to get back into this important segment. Like the Mustang, both the new Camaro and the current Dodge Challenger have taken their styling cues from earlier models, exactly what Ford did when it redesigned the Mustang.

GM’s Masterful Online Reveal of the All-New Camaro

Today, GM did what many companies in the 21st century are now beginning to do: unveil a new product offering via the internet.  Instead of waiting for a major auto show as the venue for the Big Reveal, GM showcased the 2010 Chevrolet Camaro to the entire world online.  The ten minute ceremony began promptly at 4 p.m. at the GM Tech Center in Warren, MI. with short speeches about the Camaro followed by a reveal of a bright orange pre-production model.

This is how GM succeeded with their market reveal today:

• Wisely, to get people to tune in, the company “leaked” images of the production version Camaro last week.
• These images were posted all over the internet creating a buzz which rocked the blogging world, stirred leading internet sites, and became feature articles over the weekend in the Sunday papers.
• This morning, I checked the Chevrolet Camaro site and found that GM had updated the page to announce the unveiling for later in the day.
• Immediately, many of the key automotive blogs relayed that information to their readership, causing the buzz to reach a fevered pitch.

Harnessing Internet Driven Buzz

My point with this article isn’t so much what was revealed but how it was revealed. By creating the necessary buzz leading up to the product release and taking full advantage of the strength and breadth of the internet, millions of people from around the globe were able to witness the Camaro’s introduction at one time. All of that free publicity will certainly benefit the car and the company, fueling additional free publicity for months to come.

The internet hasn’t just arrived — it is a real game changer in the way that we market our products. The key, of course, is generating the buzz and then following through with a timely and informative product reveal.

WordPress 2.6 Offers Significant Changes

Don’t you hate it when people gush over WordPress? Well, I’m okay with that as it is a very strong and capable blogging platform. I can put up with the accolades as WP is deserving of such praise.

WordPress users jump for joy upon learning about all of the action packed features in recently released v. 2.6.

One thing that users of this free weblog software tool know is that WordPress is updated on a regular basis, usually several times each year. If you manage one blog, that isn’t a problem, but if you manage a bunch of blogs, you can spend plenty of time backing up files, updating to the latest version and making sure that all of your plug-ins are working correctly. I currently manage nine WP blogs, so my work is cut out for me every time a revision is rolled out!

WordPress 2.6 was released yesterday and I’m in the process of making my updates. I’ve completed four blogs today (including this one) and will get to the remaining five over the next two days.

This latest version has some very useful features added, options which can help make blogging easier and your work more professional. As always, before doing any WP update, backup your files first.

What’s Notable:

Theme Previewer — Now an integrated part of WordPress, the new theme previewer allows you to look at your blog before you switch themes. This is tremendously useful for someone like me who has downloaded a theme, switched over to the new one, only to not like how it looked when in use. Undoing what I did doesn’t take long, but those are extra steps I certainly can do without.

Google Gears — Pre-caching pages and speeding up your site is now possible thanks to Google Gears a nifty program that make your WP blog snap into place faster. I have one blog with about one thousand articles on it and an older theme that has been dragging of late. With Google Gears pages load faster — just what your readers want and deserve!

Press This! — I’ll have to take a look at this function closely as it is something that could be used for good or for evil. Specifically, if you are visiting a website and you want to copy the text, a photograph, or something else found on that site, Press This! will let you do that with ease. I just hope that it doesn’t make lifting material off of my sites too much of a temptation for dishonest people.

Compare Post Versions — Have you ever wished you could compare various versions of a post that you wrote? Now you can, with WP’s wiki-style post versioning tool. This is particularly helpful if you collaborate on posts and need to compare revisions. If you decide to go with an earlier copy, you can click on the appropriate link and select that one. It might also be useful if you are running a contest and want to turn that post from an announcement of the contest to announcing the winner of that contest.

Avatar Choices — You get to select different avatar options with WP 2.6 by choosing Gravatars, MonsterID, Identicons, Wavatars, etc.

Improved Plug-In Management — Up until now, I wasn’t too happy with WP’s plug-in management panel. Now, plugins can be activated in one batch, deactivated at the same time, or even deleted en masse. I also like the little number flag that pops up by the Plugins tab alerting me to when an updated copy is ready to download.

Image Captions — I’ve been waiting for this tool to be integrated into WP for some time. I just could never find a plugin that I liked, so being able to put a brief note below a photograph is very helpful. I will say that this feature doesn’t always work well with every theme; one site that I manage forces the text to the left, but I’m sure that this is something that can be remedied with some minor coding work.

Lots of other smaller changes are included with WP 2.6 including full SSL support in the core, reordering of galleries through a drag and drop feature, security updates, and the fixing of almost 200 bugs.

Nope, WordPress isn’t perfect, but as a content management system it is packed with many good functions and can be extended much further with various plugins. Happy updating!

Photo Credit: Sanja Gjenero