Daimler : #mbrt15 Mercedes-Benz road trip 2015 "Guarding the new Mercedes-Benz GLE": With the new Mercedes-Benz GLE from Tuscaloosa to the world premiere in New York

This year's road trip centres on the growing SUV family from Mercedes-Benz. No other premium manufacturer offers such a diverse range from the compact to the luxury class. The international communicators will embark on the trip with the GLE - the new designation for the former M-Class -, and in various models of the G-Class and of the compact GLA. Also on the trip will be the brand-new GLE Coupé, which is establishing a new category of vehicle within the Mercedes-Benz SUV family this year. An apt starting point for the road trip is the Mercedes-Benz plant in Tuscaloosa - the traditional production location for SUVs from Mercedes-Benz and the largest such plant worldwide. Since 2014 the C-Class has also been in production here for the North American market.

For the fourth time, online journalists will be accompanying a new product on its way to its world premiere and reporting live on their impressions and experiences. The first Mercedes-Benz road trip took place in the spring of 2012 to mark the world premiere of the new A-Class, as the result of a joint idea developed by digital opinion leaders and the premium car brand.

Mercedes-Benz successful in the social web

Mercedes-Benz has been among the most successful and innovative brands on the internet for many years now. This has been proven in independent studies conducted by eBench and SocialBakers for example. The success has been measured not merely in terms of the number of fans and followers, but primarily by the high degree of interaction with people on a variety of different social networking platforms. The extensive online and social media activities by Mercedes-Benz are an integral part of a 'Digital Media House' in which Mercedes‑Benz presents premium brand content in editorial form and publishes it across the entire range of digital channels. For a number of years Mercedes-Benz has systematically opted for high-quality 'content telling' in the digital environment, establishing itself as a brand publisher.

Since 2013 Mercedes-Benz has pooled all published materials which appear on independent online media such as blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Google+ and Instagram and on its own official social media channels in the Social Cloud on the international brand website www.mercedes-benz.com. The Social Cloud is a further development of the "Mercedes-Benz Social Publish" platform, which was created for bloggers and online journalists in 2012. This is where all items published about Mercedes-Benz on external websites, in blogs and in digital magazines or on Twitter are automatically collated and teasered. This makes the portal a comprehensive research source for bloggers and journalists. Mercedes‑Benz also maintains professional, sustainable relationships with a host of international online opinion leaders from a variety of different fields - from the automotive and technology sectors through to the worlds of fashion and design and also lifestyle. They are invited not only to the company's social media events and dialogue platforms, but also to "classic" press trial drive events, exhibitions, workshops or TecDays.