In the midst of Salesforce.com’s public introduction of its Marketing Cloud product during Dreamforce, Scott Monty’s announcement may have zipped by with little notice. Scott—Ford Motor Company’s head of social media—was one of several speakers during the Thursday afternoon keynote. Salesforce Buddy Media CEO and co-founder Michael Lazerow served as an emcee as speakers paraded onstage to make the case for the Marketing Cloud. Scott was first up; his role was to tease the need for such a tool.

But in his prepared remarks, Scott said that Ford was on the brink of launching a One Social initiative, consistent with the years-old One Ford program (slogan: One Team, One Plan, One Goal).

Pointing out that customers hold people like themselves in the highest regard, Scott said that Ford’s goal was to “show people that there are people like them working at Ford Motor Company,” with employees at all levels engaged with customers through a variety of social channels.

One Social, according to Scott, recognizes that the various modes through which Ford’s many moving parts are engaging in social media “need to be united,” There are four components to the One Social vision:

• Listen and engage
• Measure and monitor
• Training
• Growth at scale

“Ford doesn’t have a standalone social media strategy,” Scott told the audience. “We have a business strategy supported by social media. We need to scale social media across our employees, dealers and customers, and know exactly how it is driving our business. We also need a unified view of social to make analysis that comes out of it available to product development, advertising or product marketing.”

Ford has been an early Marketing Cloud customer, and Scott credited the service with accommodating Ford’s vision of a social enterprise as opposed to a company that uses social media for various marketing efforts.

Scott also noted that “Content is the currency of social,” showing how a variety of stories were deployed during the Facebook-centered launch of the 2011 Ford Explorer, which produced 99 million impressions on the day of the launch, earning it the top spot among Twitter’s trending topics.

Scott’s work at Ford is always worth close attention, since Ford isn’t a high-tech startup or a tech-savvy new-economy business. The 100-plus-year-old big iron manufacturer qualifies as one of those “conservative companies” people keep telling me they work for by way of explaining why they’re not making much headway with social technologies. Ford’s recognition that becoming a social enterprise goes far beyond disrete campaigns should lead others to start looking at how to weave these technologies throughout the business in order to produce measurable value.

Scott’s message certainly resonated with the Dreamforce crowd, which ranked him the third most popular keynoter of the day, one ahead of Colin Powell.

Update: Scott’s presentation is now available on YouTube: