When the recall crisis hit, the social media team members at Toyota knew they were going to have to play an active role in rebuilding the brand’s reputation and getting back the trust of their consumers.
They realized that as a company, Toyota was not very good at talking about itself , whether the news be good or bad, and that during this crisis, talking with consumers was going to be a critical part of getting back the brand loyalty lost during the recall.
Kimberley Gardiner, Toyota’s national digital marketing and social media manager, and her team realized that what they really needed to do was augment their social media strategy. Here’s how they did it:
- Get the executives up front. Toyota’s U.S. division CEO, Jim Lentz, went on Digg to answer questions from the community during the peak of the recall. Putting the company’s leaders out there to answer questions helped build humanize the brand.
- Create positive news. With all the negative sentiment about the brand, Toyota created new, interesting content that sparked positive conversations. Its “Swagger Wagon” viral video campaign was used to launch a new Sienna minivan. It received more than 11 million views, and people still talk about it months later. It then turned this campaign into a competition and asked consumers for their own remixes of the video.
- Find the voices of your brand’s advocates. Toyota’s social channels became the place for consumers to share positive feedback and stories about the brand without being prompted to do so. Because of this, the company started a campaign called “Autobiography” where consumers could upload stories about their vehicle, whether it was through words, photos, or videos. 13,180 stories were submitted, and the number of “likes” on Toyota’s Facebook page doubled in two months.
Watch Gardiner’s presentation:
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My company, thisMoment, was excited to help bring Auto-Biographies to life for Toyota!
Hi Andy, I am currently writing my dissertation on the use of socialmedia during the Toyota recall and was directed to this article by another student. It is great to see your point of view on the use of social media, especially when focusing on media relations! I have also been looking into the use of social media to communicate key messages to consumers. What do you think about this? Do you think that social media is the most appropriate way to deal with consumer queries, or are these still better handled through letters and telephone calls?
I Christina, Cale Johnson here with Andy Sernovitz and crew at SocialMedia.org.
Personally, I think social media is another channel in the mix of potential ways customers can seek support. Especially with Twitter, we're seeing a lot of brands doing interesting things to help their customers.
But there are issues of scaling this, and there are also challenges with privacy (example: financial companies have to be extra careful supporting customers in social media) — so phone and email support still have their place.
It's not an issue of one channel replacing others — they all have their advantages and disadvantages. The brands with the best customer support are using them all.
Thank you for a great post and an interesting video. I think that this can truly show us the power that social media has. Toyota's reputation was badly damaged last year, and now is seems that almost no one remembers it. This is an amazing result, and there is no doubt that Toyota's use of social media played a big part in this.
Now, it seems only natural that they would resort to social media to communicate with consumers. However, I think this transition was hard for the company because it was not prepared for such a thing. Luckily, Toyota used social media in the correct way, they did not use it for sales but used in to rebuild the trust of consumers. In addition it was made to be fun, competitions, videos, Auto-biography, and cartoons, were only some of the features that were implemented to build a connection with consumers. Toyota provided a platform for their customers to share all the stories they have (good and bad) which helped them to be more transparent. Transparency is very important nowadays, and social media helped them with this issue, since prior to this transparency was not in their culture. Lastly, Toyota was also willing to listen to the consumers that had bad experiences which is crucial with social media.
Overall, I believe that Toyota did a great job with dealing and recuperating. Toyota was actually able to use this as an opportunity to develop the brand while increasing their social media presence