Toyota: Making All of the Right Moves in a Crisis

In January of 2010, Toyota faced a major crisis: it had to recall 2.3 million vehicles because of faulty accelerator pedals. As a company known for its safety and reliability, this could have been a huge blow to its brand given how it was trending on both Google and Twitter. This was also one of the first times that a car company was facing such a crisis in the social media era.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, Toyota took the crisis as an opportunity and used a social media platform that I had not previously heard of called Digg. (Digg is a social news website that allows people to vote web content up or down, called “digging” and “burying,” respectively. In the months leading up to Toyota’s crisis, Digg apparently had between 37 million to 44 million unique visitors each month!)

Toyota created a “Digg Dialogg” with Jim Lentz, its president of North American sales operation, via a dedicated video site. The questions that he answered — which were selected out of 3,200 that were received — had been vetted by fans in advance and were generally friendly. Within just one week of the Dialogg, the video had received 1.2 million views and Toyota was lauded for its transparency and while its brand perception was not immediately as high as it had been before the crisis, it regained much of its footing.

In addition, according to Doug Frisbie, Toyota Motor Sales USA’s national social media and marketing integration manager, Toyota was able to grow its Facebook fan base more than 10% within one month of the crisis. Its strategy was to create a “social media response room” that was always staffed with six to eight people who were monitoring the online conversation and responding at all times. It also used a strategy of reposting (with permission) tweets, blog posts, and videos on its platforms that others who were loyal to the company had generated.

I think that Toyota handled this crisis wisely: its engaged with its audience, was as transparent as possible, and was able to control the narrative regarding its brand. In examining its strategy, my only suggestion would be that going forward, it use platforms that are more popular like Twitter. That is, while Digg made sense at the time given its popularity, the company should be sure to adjust its social media presence to reflect the shifts in social media usage by its key constituents.

This post is part of a blog series for a Social Media Management course that I am taking at MIT Sloan School of Management. For this blog, we were asked to identify a company’s crisis, evaluate the company’s social response, and comment if we would have handled the crisis differently.