Chevrolet Makes Social Media-Style Road Trip to SXSW

In a different kind of Movement, Chevrolet will send eight teams on a road trip to Austin for SXSW. Departing from San Diego, Detroit, Lansing, Chicago, Atlanta, South Florida, North Carolina and New York in early March, the teams will be given a series of clues to various destinations along the way and be asked to participate in several challenges (50 per team in all some of which will be "crowd sourced") such as using OnStar to assist someone along the way, stop at an animal shelter and give a dog a walk, grab a pen from a Chevrolet dealership, stuff the trunk of the vehicle full of balloons, meet up with a Twitter follower and give them a ride in the vehicle, sing in a public place and more.

Drivers and their teams will blog their adventures on a Posterous blog. GM is clear to point out speed to Austin is not part of the challenge. Winners will be determined challenge performance and the level of audience engagement they engender along the way.

In a document sent to each of the participants, achievement and success will be determined thusly:

"Achievement of a challenge is defined by the successful completion of the task and proof of that completion documented in video or photo form and uploaded to the lifestreaming site. Additionally, items in the "Collection" category must also be physically brought to Austin to the welcome reception in order for full credit to be granted. Each team will be awarded three points for every challenge they compete successfully.

Audience engagement is defined by number of tweets that reference your activities in the Road Trip as measured by unique team hashtag, number of posts to the lifestreaming site, number of comments on your team's posts on the lifestreaming site, number of posts on your personal website(s) that reference the Road Trip and number of comments on your personal website(s) referencing posts about the Road Trip. Each team will be awarded one point for every tweet, post and comment."

Chevrolet will provide each team with a FlipCam and cover all expenses for the teams along the way. The teams will be led by:

San Diego - @brassfield (TrendHunter.com)
Detroit - @balanon
Lansing - @betsyweber
Chicago - @timjahn
Atlanta - @tessa
South Florida - @tammycamp
North Carolina - @jakrose
New York - @rshotel (Brian Simpson of the Roger Smith Hotel).