Driving the social agenda

With the abundance of social media sites, it is understandable that each would adopt a sticky, if not aggressive, strategy to develop loyalty among users. The stream of emails and offers might work with some people, but it does nothing for my car.

Yes, my car has its own social media page. I created it in advance of a possible sale. The page features a large photograph of the car, with an accompanying paragraph that gives the relevant details.

The very next day after posting, and at regular intervals after, my car began receiving emails from the site. Each one starts, "Hi Volks." The first one was notification about the page being favorited by the team behind the social site.

At first, I laughed it off. Then I became intrigued. How far would the site go before it realized the subject of the page was a car?

A couple dozen people have already viewed the Volks page, according to site statistics. And now the car is being encouraged to create collections of similar pages, to compliment other pages, and to share its backstory.

Such a welcoming social strategy would be more, well, welcome if intended for and received by a human. But the fact that the process has been so automated as to not recognize an inanimate object is being featured is telling.

Unless, that is, the automated robot saw a kindred spirit in a mechanical driving machine. Then these emails make perfect sense. Although so far Volks has been too shy to reply.