Why Toyota Is Missing the Social Media Mark

Tiger Woods. Toyota. South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. The list goes on and on, doesn’t it? The list of people (brands, really) and companies (brands for sure) that have lost their reputation.

Last week, I heard a terrific presentation by Peter Morrissey, President and CEO of Morrissey & Company, professor at Boston College and author of the respected Mount Vernon Report, on reputation. He defined reputation with words such as character, integrity and authenticity. He further postulated that reputation is one of the most valuable assets a corporation can have. And while protecting the asset of corporate reputation is the primary goal of public relations, it is not a goal always shared with corporate marketing, which can have shorter term sales objectives depending on revenues, time of year and inventories.

What builds a reputation? Peter says its a combination of people, products, conduct of business and financial performance. Ultimately, he says, it is simple acts that build the content of character over time.

As I read the latest Associated Press story this morning about Toyota’s recall debacle, I was struck by the news that Toyota has beefed up its public relations support. Of course they have. Once again, public relations is brought in to clean up a mess, rather than being at the table prior to a crisis to provide strategy. (I’m guessing that’s the case, because if PR has been legitimately involved all along, they should be fired).

Public relations is continually sidelined by marketing and lawyers who have the ear of the C-suite and usually the bigger budgets. But that formula is wrong. The advent of online news and the 24/7 cycle, combined with the velocity of social media, has created a situation where public relations must be involved in communications planning at the highest levels of decision making.

Toyota’s engagement in social media gets a grade of C+ at best. While the outpouring of support on Facebook has been huge, there has been nominal posting in response. Toyota doesn’t even have a Twitter account, so their engagement there is a big fat zero. Yet the conversation on Twitter about Toyota is endless. Interestingly, Jim Lentz, President and COO of Toyota Motor Sales, USA, is going on a Live Digg Dialogg today to answer the public’s questions. Digg? Really? They are playing it safe by testing the waters on a relatively small social network to see how it plays before going big time on the mainstream sites. When you have a big global problem, playing it safe is not a winning strategy. There should be teams working around the clock, actively engaging on social networks. Toyota’s message should be clear by this point and those teams should be supporting it every day, every hour. It’s going to take a lot of work, in every media and social channel on the planet to rebuild Toyota’s reputation. These are mistakes that cannot be undone and each day the hole gets deeper. Or in Toyota’s case, several million dollars bigger. Tiger, are you listening?

In 2009 many of us learned to do more with less. In the agency world that translated to doing more work for our clients on slimmer budgets. Part of making that work has been figuring out inexpensive ways to both disseminate information and monitor/gather coverage and conversations. While agencies will continue to be pressed in 2010, it is critical that clients support their efforts with the right tools.

This is particularly the case because (effective Dec. 1st) the FTC has put a stake in the ground regarding transparency in the social media world, and while we will see over the next six months if they were just saber rattling or for real, companies ignore certain aspects at their own risk. One of the most potentially troublesome pieces of the new FTC regulations is the requirement that companies monitor and correct misinformation posted to social media sites about their products or services. That is a lot of liability in an enormous landscape.

As I think about the coming year, there are two things that I believe every company that is engaged in social media and/or public relations should be considering. Neither has to be very expensive, but companies that don’t implement them will be at a competitive disadvantage, and possibly high risk, in 2010.

1. Twitter search and Google Alerts (which are both currently free) are great, but they are not a guarantee that you are catching every mention about your company on the millions of blogs, forums, tweets and Facebook posts made each day. Invest in a credible monitoring service. It will save your team time in gathering posts and also provide a reporting structure. Some that we like and have heard great things about include Filtrbox, Radian6, Scoutlabs and Spiral16.

2. Set up your online press room. No more excuses. If you do not have a press room on your website, which is preferable, then go directly to pitchengine.com and set one up. It’s $50 a month for a dynamic, linkable, social press room. The web is where the media go first for info. If you don’t make it easy for them, they will find another company that will.

Simple, but I believe very important for any company still holding on to the belief that doing social media and public relations without the right tools is possible.

An update to my earlier post about the 2010 Campaign for Sushi (or any other non-profit you love). Chase Bank is giving away $5 million, in $25,000 increments to the non-profits who receive the most votes on their Facebook fan page. Just become a fan, vote for Sushi Inc. (you get 20 votes so you can share the love) and then share the link with your friends. You can click on the Vote for Us button below to get you there. Social good through social media. Terrific.

Did you hear about the $22 million theater complex that was unveiled yesterday at the Old Globe in Balboa Park? Wow. What a phenomenal achievement for San Diego, the nation and the arts community. It will be the sixth largest theater in the country. To find the support and funding for that kind of project in these economic times confirms the notion that art must be supported by patrons in order to thrive and that despite tough times people recognize the value of art and culture in soothing our cultural psyche.

It’s tough to ask for money to support the arts while children go hungry and families live on the street. Yet, without the arts to reflect our imaginings and relieve our sometimes relentless reality, this life is less worthy of the struggle. Artists take risks and express beauty and pain in ways that we need. And art takes many forms – some that is familiar or humorous and some that is awkward and just plain weird. Sushi, A Center for the Urban Arts, located in San Diego’s East Village, has been home to more of the latter than the former, so it has a harder time finding big dollar donors. Its support has always been grassroots.

Sushi provides a home for artists who are usually struggling, yet still committed to offering up contemporary, multidisciplinary art for our collective enjoyment. It has been a center of alternative art in San Diego for nearly 30 years, yet like so many other non-profit organizations, has been battered by the financial tightening of the past year.

Will you join me in supporting Sushi? I don’t always understand what I see there, but San Diego shouldn’t lose one of the only places that supports art that’s pretty much on the opposite end of the spectrum from The Old Globe. Communities that value art need both.

We are asking for whatever you can afford (from $10 – $100, it all counts). Our goal is $30,000 by January 15th to pay for 2010 programming. Highlights for 2010 include Dutch artist Oscar Prinsen, Russian physical theatre company ARTEL, international Fringe Festival favorites Die Rotten Punkte and San Diego’s own acclaimed choreographer, Patricia Sandback.

In addition to our online ask, we are selling some furniture here on Craig’s List and all proceeds will be donated to Sushi. We’re also cooking up a really cool all-ages photography class with Paul M. Bowers that will happen in January, with proceeds going to Sushi (watch the Sushi homepage for more info soon).

Thank you for reading, considering and hopefully making a contribution today by clicking on the ChipIn link on this page.

If a company doesn’t have someone who can manage their social media in-house, does that mean that company shouldn’t be on the social networks? There’s a lot of hubbub in the PR and social media worlds these days about who should manage social media. We have clients that get the value of listening, learning and engaging with their community but don’t have the resources to manage the enormous time suck that is social media. Should they be left out?

The best scenario is when you have a client like Meagan at Seaport Village. She has a passion for social media, can write well and has an eagerness to learn. In this relationship, we provided our client with strategy, helped her develop a blog, taught her how to use keywords and tags, and continually coach her on the latest tools and trends. We are her social media sherpas and it works really well.

But what about those clients who don’t have anyone in their marketing department to take it on? Our first answer is – it doesn’t have to be someone in the marketing department, it has to be someone at your company who has a passion for social media. We can teach and guide almost anybody if they’ve got that. But what if they don’t have that either. Are they out of luck?

I don’t think so. If the public relations team is a true member of their client’s communications team and has taken the time to understand their client’s business, its audiences, and challenges, then they can shepherd the brand through the social networks. Ideally, there is SOMEONE at the company who can be the team’s eyes and ears on the ground and take photos or send quick texts or emails about things as they happen in real time. That way you’ve got real time sharing, along with the brand interaction and monitoring. And in our experience you will eventually find someone in house who wants to participate.

It’s not ideal, but it’s better than nothing. When companies have no presence at all, they often get taken to task for not listening or being present. So is it better to be there through a proxy who knows the brand and manages its public communication on a daily basis anyway? Or better to be absent? What do you think?

Image via Wikipedia

Blogworld is a 3-day conference in Las Vegas where bloggers and social media fans gather to learn, share, meet and drink (well, c’mon, it’s in Vegas). I have been thinking about some of my big takeaways from this year’s event and finally have a chance to share them with you.

Here are the most important social media tips straight from the experts:

1. Laura Fitton (@pistachio) has a heart of gold and her attitude on life and work is one worth sharing (no wonder she has so many followers on Twitter). Loved this nugget from her keynote on Being Awesome:

Learn to be lucky.

Isn’t that simple? I think it’s true. Here are the other bits to that sentiment:

Maximize chance opportunities

Listen to lucky hunches (in other words trust your gut)

Expect good fortune

Turn bad luck to good (what you make out of any experience is really up to you, isn’t it?)

2. One more from Laura (she’s that good)

Think about how you are going to use social media in a crisis. Southwest Airlines has already scripted tweet posts for potential crisis situations. That is being on your A-game. Have you thought about what your potential crises might be and how you would manage on the social networks (hint: silence is not an option).

3. Frank Eliason (@comcastcares) was one of my faves at Blogworld last year and he did not disappoint this year. He pointed out that the social media space is about passion (that was a consistent theme this year).  Companies mess up because they don’t put their most passionate people in social media roles. It doesn’t matter what department they are in, the person who LOVES it will make it succeed for their company.

4. Frank (yup, he’s great) also explained how he got Comcast into social media and told us that he listened through Twitter search, a powerful tool indeed, for two months before jumping into the conversation. Giving the time to listen is critical to social media success.

5. Justin Levy (@justinlevy) shared a nice case study about using social media for a small business (a free-standing restaurant). They had one goal in their efforts – to lift their searchability on Google with key words that people would use to find a restaurant in that area. It worked and the effort resulted in a 20% lift in business that has continued ever since.

6. Has anyone who reads this blog not heard of Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan)? He talked about his move back toward email this past year and its importance in the marketing chain. Email provides targeted communication to those who want to hear from you. Key quote, “You live or die by your database.” Nuff said.

7. Really think about who you are trying to talk to in social networks. That was the mantra of Mari Smith (@marismith), another social media maven. Write it down, find them and talk to them. It’s easy to get distracted in social media, you must focus and follow one course until successful (love the belief that eventually you will be!).

8. If anyone ever doubted that blogs are becoming a business, Richard Jalichandra (@jalichandra) put the kibosh on those silly thoughts. According to Technorati’s Annual State of the Blogosphere the number one change/trend in 2009 was the rise of the professional blogger. People are making money writing blogs and it seems that will grow now that blogs are considered mainstream media.

9. Which led to takeaway number 9, which is that anyone who wants to figure out how to make money with their blog needs to dig deeply into Affiliate Marketing. Kim Rowley (@kimarketing) told us her shoe blog, shoeaholicsanonymous, pays for her mortgage. Look closely at that blog to start figuring out how to monetize your efforts. Here’s a clue – what looks like her blogroll is really a list of affiliate links. Smart lady.

10. We received a whole list of prognostications from Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang), which is probably a post for another day, but I couldn’t leave him off the list. So here’s one of his crystal-ball predications – social personalization is on the way. It’s just starting this year but it’s moving fast. Smart companies will start pulling from and using robust identity profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Programs like Facebook Connect and Google Connect will provide personalized content, personalized advertising and experiences.  Sony used Facebook Connect for the release of Zombieland, which not only integrates the user into the story, it also provides a button to enable sharing with FB friends. Owyang says that if you give Sony access to your FB profile, you will have a better experience when you log on to its page; it will make personalized recommendations based on what you share. Kinda scary, but hey no one makes us share this info, we’re all volunteers in this experiment.

Image via CrunchBase

I’ve been using Zemanta for nearly a year and I have to tell you, it rocks. If you want to write a post that is visually rich with relevant links in the shortest amount of time, Zemanta helps you do that.

It works with all the major blog platforms. For those of us who love Firefox, you can install it as a Plugin, so it automatically opens on the platform page and as you write your post it provides contextually relevant images and links. Less time spent hunting for URL links and copying and pasting is a good thing. Here’s a quick video that explains how easy it is to use. Did I mention that it’s free?

Image by sniggy via Flickr

Today is Blog Action Day. The issue being written about and discussed around the planet is Climate Change. We have asked one of our Pinnacle Worldwide partners, Jonathan Wootliff, who has spent his life immersed in corporate responsibility and climate change issues to write a guest blog post. Thanks much Jonathan!

The heat’s now on corporations to address the growing challenge of global warming.

With less than 50 days to the international climate change summit in Copenhagen, the issue is increasingly making headlines.  As consumer and other stakeholders’ concerns grow, there are heightened expectations of business to help fix the problem.

Crop failures, coastal erosion, extinction of endangered species, lack of fresh drinking water and severe economic effects are just some of the dire consequences predicted by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Without doubt, this is The Issue of the Century. And it’s got to be the most sizzling corporate affairs topic.

President Obama says global warming is an urgent threat, and wants the US to lead in confronting the climate crisis.  A key condition of GM’s bail-out is to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of its products.  The Environmental Protection Agency is reaching out to companies through its Climate Leaders program to encourage the development of comprehensive climate change strategies.

As the American Clean Energy and Security Bill makes its way to the Senate, the big question is what does all this mean for business?

What impact do companies have on climate change?  What steps are they taking to reduce their carbon footprint?  Are they contributing to the problem or to the solutions?

This is clear public affairs territory.

As a former Greenpeace Director, I know it’s the ideal time for me to start a new Corporate Accountability practice at specialist issues management firm, Reputation Partners.
Credibility of environmental activists is riding high, andthey’re sharpening their focus on corporations.  Business must find ways to work with civil society.  Corporations need smart strategies like never before.

It’s a perfect storm for our profession.  And it’s a perfect opportunity for brilliant businesses brains.

I’ll put money on Obama dropping in on the Copenhagen summit as he flies in to neighboring Oslo to collect his Nobel Peace Prize in December.  That will give yet more air time to this burning issue.

Corporations must be prepared.  I look forward to exchanging ideas with fellow professionals as to how we can give the best advice to ensure that business is seen as climate hero, and not the villain.

by Jonathan Wootliff, Head of Corporate Accountability, Reputation Partners

jonathan@reputationpartners.com

Just returned from a terrific meeting in Seattle with our Pinnacle Worldwide agency partners where there was a lot of interesting sharing about social media and how agencies are using it for clients.

Allison McCormick, a partner at Conkling Fiskum & McCormick (CFM), presented an overview of their social media program for Tillamook cheese and it just goes to show that anything can find social love, even cheese.

The basis of the CFM strategy was to use social media to grow a Fan Club and integrate customer engagement with PR, social media and events. Currently, every point of marketing points to the website and its working.

Turns out, a lot of people have a connection with Tillamook cheese. People have memories of factory tours as a child, favorite family recipes, special picnics, football games, you name it! Fans had already started their own social love online with Facebook fan pages, and talking about it on blogs and Twitter.

CFM created an official Tillamook Facebook page and in just over a year have collected more than 23,000 fans. Unlike many companies that want to drive fans to their Facebook page, Tillamook has never offered a FB incentive. It has all been fan driven. Online manager Jake is the personality for the page and he uses humor and authenticity to inspire people to sign up and/or respond to his posts. The profile of the fans is pretty perfect too – primarily women aged 35-44, their target demo.

Go to the @TillamookCheese Twitter page to see a well-branded Twitter profile page. They share recipes, news about contests, answer questions and, as with the Facebook page, link people back to the Tillamook Fan Club site.

At the Fan Club site there are a dizzying number of cheddar-inspired ways to get your cheese on.  CFM is focused on relationship development and providing relevant content at this site where more than 4,000 cheese lovers have signed up. Check out the ways fans can engage:

1. Post your Tillamook story and you might win a year’s worth of cheese
2. Share your cheeesy photos and video
3. Pick up some new recipes or submit your own
4. Check out the latest Loaf Love ads
5. Track the Tillamook Mac & Cheese Recipe Contest and Cook-Off
6. Search for restaurants that serve Tillamook
7. Take a survey
8. Sign up for the monthly newsletter

You really could get lost in cheesy goodness on this site. Kudos to CFM for creating and implementing a social media strategy that fits the brand and gives its fans what they want, a cheddarific experience.

Image via CrunchBase

Twitter is endlessly fascinating not only for its social and marketing implications but for all the ingenious applications people keep coming up with to make it more trackable, manageable and just plain fun. Here are a couple of tools we have been playing around with here at Bailey Gardiner.

With only 140 characters to get your message across, shortened URLs are essential for sharing links on Twitter while still having room for your post. We’ve been looking at two of the most popular – bit.ly and Su.pr.

bit.ly is the shortener that comes loaded on Tweetdeck and Seesmic. Once you sign up for a bit.ly account here, you can track how many people click the link you tweeted.  You can send the link and your Twitter post from your bit.ly homepage and it automatically adds the link to your “history” so you can see how many people click through.

To simplify this process you can add a Sidebar Bookmarklet from the bit.ly site to your toolbar (on a Mac you just drag it over. You PC people are on your own, sorry.) Then when you go to a site you want to share, you just click on the Sidebar link and it opens up on top of the page you want to send out with the URL already shortened and a box for you to write your tweet post. Easier than copying the URL, going to your bit.ly homepage and then pasting the link into the shortener.

If you mostly work from Tweetdeck you can add your API Key to your Tweetdeck Settings. Just click on this link at the bit.ly tools page and it walks you through it. It will then add your links sent from Tweetdeck to your bit.ly homepage history. Doesn’t appear that Seesmic has this feature yet.

Another bit.ly feature I have been playing with is the Preview Plugin for Firefox (see sample above). It expands bit.ly links on web pages so you can see the full title and info like how many people have clicked in the link, etc. before you decide to click through or not. This is a pretty cool Firefox extension. It works (most of the time) when looking at your followers page on Twitter too. Simplifies the screening process for following back.

Su.pr works in a similar manner to bit.ly. Sign up for your own account and then you can post tweets from your Su.pr dashboard and track click throughs. You can also add a Su.pr bookmark to your toolbar (like bit.ly) so that you can send out a Twitter post from a website you want to share rather than have to go to your dashboard.

Su.pr was developed by the folks at Stumbleupon with the help of Tim Ferris (yeah, he’s that 4-Hour Workweek guy. Still haven’t mastered that), so it has the added benefit of also sharing your links with your Stumbleupon account, simplifying the process a bit. You can read Tim’s early preview post about it here. Su.pr provides the following tools:

• schedule your posts
• see click-thoughs in real time
• see how many retweets you got
• track your click throughs on Stumbleupon
• track your most popular
• learn the best time to post a Tweet based on your click through history (really like this feature)

I think both shorteners offer great tools to help us learn about our followers, particularly what they like and don’t like. You can’t go wrong with either, but they each have their strengths. bit.ly is ubiquitous so if you just rely on it, all your data is in one spot. However, I do think I have reached more people with Su.pr because of the added Stumbleupon feature. I wouldn’t necessarily take the time to Stumble every link I send out, but according to my Su.pr stats I have had more than 15K stumbles in just a month of usage. That’s a lot of potential eyeballs.

What, if anything, are you using? What do you like or dislike about it?