Ford Social Community Website

Shortly after joining Team Detroit (now GTB) in 2015, I was involved in a very ambitious project for our Ford clients. They wanted to boost their online social community to increase brand awareness and loyalty. They had an existing social community site that had gone through a few iterations of technology stacks, but was not performing to their expectations. They wanted to turn their website into a world class social community that their customers would be proud to engage with.

The original site was built on WordPress as seen below:

The site was updated in 2013 and was migrated from WordPress to Adobe CQ5. While this iteration provided an upgrade, the agency and Ford clients were still struggling with a way to handle proper, timely moderation of user generated content (UGC) uploaded to the site by end-users. The original process was painstaking and inefficient. They were looking to improve this functionality in order for the site to function effectively as a social community that could support the vast amount of Ford customers and enthusiasts visiting daily.

So, we set out to redesign the entire site from the ground up on a newer more modern platform that would allow agency moderators to efficiently approve or deny content uploaded by members of the Ford Social community. I worked step-by-step with our development partners at Cognifide (recently merged with Wonderman Thompson Technology) to build the site using Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) 6.0 with a MongoDB backend for storing user generated content (UGC), complete with a secure dashboard for agency moderators. Unfortunately, I do not have any screenshots of the dashboard to showcase here, but here are a few images of the redesigned Ford Social home page and an article page that aggregates related content along the bottom of the article.

We launched the newly redesigned Ford Social site in January of 2017 just in time for the Super Bowl LI. We set up some DNS redirect rules for a couple of Ford domains gofurther.ford.com and ford.com/go-further so that all traffic coming to these domains was rerouted to Ford Social where we had campaign specific messaging. Thanks to working with our partners at Akamai as well as some solid engineering, we handled the Super Bowl traffic load without incident. Just for nostalgia, here is a link to the the commercial we used. Enjoy!