Social Media: An Opportunity in Crisis

Companies are quick to jump in social media trend for its convenience, low cost, and wide range of outreach. Yet, social media can do far more than that. It’s a view into a side of social media that we don’t usually see—the power of course-correction and reputation defense.

Toyota leveraged social media to rebuild its brand when it faced a PR nightmare of a high-profile recall due to faulty accelerator pedals in January 2010. Unlike what Audi had its gas accelerator recall in 1980s, Toyota had to do all under the 24/7 scrutiny of social media. The raged public rose Toyota to the top of the trend on Google, Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets, but, of course, for all negative sentiments.

But Kimberley Gardiner, Toyota’s national digital marketing and social media manager, saw the story from the other side. When he found that a lot of customers reached out to them via social media, Gardiner realized an opportunity of rebuilding brand recognition through the rising trend. They launched an online campaign—“Auto-Biography” to encourage customers to share their experiences of Toyota on its Facebook page, from the “wonderful”, to the “crazy”, to the “not-so-happy”. The campaign wound up in the submission of over 13000 stories and among which thousands were about the safety experience of Toyota. It was a customer-content oriented campaign where the negative stories and posts were not censored. This campaign served collectively an asset to counter the public perception of Toyota as unsafe.

Another successful social media approach did by the team is that they let Jim Lentz, president of Toyota’s North American sales operation reach out to the masses in the form of a Digg Dialogg. They put on a dedicated video of Lentz answering all the questions voted on by fans. Within a week, the Dialogg reached a fairly huge audience to do a two-way communication with the company.

All those social media efforts paid off as Toyota’s image bounced back though not to where they were before the crisis. Therefore, social media offers an opportunity to companies in crisis of defending reputation and rebuilding brand.

Resource: Article “How Toyota Used Social Media To “Digg” Itself Out of a PR Nightmare”: http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/how-toyota-helped-digg-itself-out-trouble-101993