Race a Mercedes around the web

Mercedes Benz is taking its Concept A-Class to the virtual world allowing Australians to create customised tracks, race friends, possibly qualify and go on to win a B-Class Merc.

Car manufacturers, like many other established businesses around the world are increasingly realising the benefit of social media to spread hype. Websites such as Facebook enable a fast and highly functional way to engage potential customers.

Honda recently used a Facebook competition to promote the new Civic, believing this information-delivery method would be in sync with the Civic’s target demographic.

Even the carsales network embraced the blogosphere when we helped organise a competition of potential bloggers diarising their experience with a Ford Focus. The competition was very popular with both entrants and readers giving an everyday-person outlook on car ownership.

Mercedes is using social media to spread the word, the idea is that those of us with a blog, or similar online presence, can build and host top-down race tracks for others to compete upon. The track creation tool is simple, fast and has a nice range of track bits to piece together.

The result is a simple top-down racer where players can compete against friends and qualifying times are uploaded to a competition database. A successful racer can find themselves in the running for AU$24,000 pool of prises fortnightly or ultimately a $60k B-Class.

?Rebecca Williams, eMarketing Manager, Marketing Communications said: "Both the C-Class My Reasons (www.myreasons.com.au) and Race Around The Web campaigns utilise Facebook as a way to connect with our audience online -- three months ago we launched the Mercedes-Benz Facebook fan page today we have over 11,000 fans. Ultimately, it’s about engaging new audiences and to do that, we must gain permission to start a conversation online."

To be in the running to win the major prize, a Mercedes-Benz B-Class, participants must race all five predetermined Championship Tracks which you can find listed on www.racearoundtheweb.com.au.