Can social media revive a dead car?

Here is the story so far.

Joel Ewanick, the CMO Global Marketing at General Motors, recently joined Twitter. A Twitter user called @chevalanche tweeted Joel with a simple request, "I want an El Camino. Badly. Please!". To this, Joel replied, "well, we need you and 100000 of your best friends".

What they are talking about here is Chevrolet's El Camino, a half coupé half pickup truck. It has been dead since 1987 and the closest thing to that design that exists today is the Holden Ute Series II. It is indeed sad that such an extroverted design is so rare today. Can anything persuade GM to bring it back?

Maybe, Social Media?

Popular automobile cult website Jalopnik picked up the conversation and appealed to all its followers, through Facebook and Twitter, to comment on a post which talks about the development so far. If the number of comments surpasses 100000, GM will, if they have any pride and honour, bring back a design that is pretty much dead in the automobile world.

So far they have registered 1800 comments in 2 days. It will be interesting to see where Joel's slightly careless comment leads. I am not a personal fan of the El Camino but it is such an irrational design that the world would definitely be a livelier place with it around. GM can also earn itself a 'cool' badge if they make this happen!

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Why you should add Facebook Comments Box to each Blogger post

If you are not aware yet, Facebook Comments Box is a social plug-in by Facebook that allows people to comment on a website. With what I had read, the comments are linked to the user's Facebook profile and anything that' posted on the comment box appears on the user's profile. Replying to the update on the user's profile updates the comment on the comment section as well and vice-versa.

Ok. I will try to avoid the word 'comment' from now on.

To cut to the chase, I am not a programmer and do not understand complex coding. That's why, when I tried to add a umm... comment box to my blog. I came across a strange problem. I found out that there are two versions of it and each with a critical shortcoming for Blogger.

First version:

Following the instructions laid our here, I successfully managed to integrate the box. However, when I tested it out, there was a major problem as can be seen below -

Yup! There is no option to 'like' or 'reply' to any comment posted there which sort of defeats the whole purpose of trying to reach out the Facebook audience. However, the advantage here is that each post has its own unique mention on a persons Facebook feed.

2nd version:

Since the previous version didn't meet my need to engage people on Facebook, I tried to integrate the box which can be seen on TechCrunch. For the actual implementation, I found help here.

Great! So now I can reply and like other users comments but then... there was another problem. Using this method displayed the box not only on each post, but also the blog homepage. Moreover, the post made on Facebook leads the users to the blog home page and not the post itself.

Solution:

Simple. Add the following code at the end of each blog post's HTML.

<div id='fb-root'></div><p><script src='http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#appId=Insert App ID here&xfbml=1'></script><fb:comments href='Insert URL here' num_posts='5' width='550'></fb:comments><br>

Don't for to place your post's URL instead of 'URL of post goes here'. So there you go! Good day...

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