Ford Fiesta 2011 sends tweets

Social media marketing is one thing no carmaker can afford to avoid. But when a car starts tweeting you know that the trend has reached its next level. So, when AJ a 2011 Ford Fiesta model started sending tweets everyone sat up and noticed. Many a times a products effectiveness and popularity is checked by how many communities it has and what is the fan base. This makes social networking and microblogging impossible to ignore for a carmaker as people are getting more and more tech-savvy.

However, the curious thing to note is that a car, which is obviously an inanimate object, can send twitter messages. The first question that comes to mind is how? AJ has an app called the “Auto”matic Blog that is designed to process data such as location, speed, acceleration, braking, windshield wipers, steering input and GPS data and correlate it with live information pulled from the Web. In simple terms AJ calculates real-time information and information that is forecasted to give out relevant messages.

AJ, the 2011 is actually a guinea pig of the engineers at Ford Motor. They are trying to find out the outcome of connecting all the systems of a car to the internet. So, this car AJ that is active on Twitter starts sending messages as and when it is involved in driving or any other car related activity. One of its messages reads - “It’s getting pretty dark; time to put the headlights on,” was a typical entry, but followers also learned when AJ’s mood was “joyful.” Joe Rork, an information technology architect with Ford’s in-vehicle research and strategy team was quoted, “There’s no traffic, and it’s not raining and it’s enjoying a winding road.

This is a step taken by Ford to meet its future vision of making communication between cars and owners easier. The company would be soon providing smartphone apps including a Twitter feed, to its Sync-based cars later this year. A while later, the company would allow several other apps to use the vehicle’s built in controls like buttons on the steering wheel, music players running on connected Android phones etc. So essentially AJ is an experiment to find out what all could be the possibilities when your car is online all the time. It is a cause of great interest for most people when a car is sending messages as cars have never really ‘communicated’ in the past. So, please do not be disheartened if in future your car has more followers on Twitter than you do!