Hari Ramachandran,
Insight Executive,
Yomego
Toyota
It is no secret that Toyota’s brand image hit the skids when the company had to recall millions of cars after various defective components. With this in mind, Toyota has done relatively well to bounce back and take 16th place in our table. Their social media strategy has seen some acceleration (sick of the puns, already?) after a stuttering start.
The brand partnered with TweetMeme to develop Toyotaconversations.com, a branded channel aggregating dialogue around popular links on Twitter referencing the brand, with links to other social presences and to information around the recalls. The channel appears to be the company’s way of showing transparency and trying to demonstrate that it is listening to its customers.
The fact that Toyota has demonstrated that it is prepared to identify problems and directly address negative criticism has helped it stem the flow of negative references around the brand.
It hasn’t all been fire-fighting though, and Toyota has not been shy to use social spaces to start and maintain conversations around specific models. On YouTube, the 'Swagger Wagon' video made to promote the Sienna Minivan received more than 8m views since May 2010.
Toyota is now running a campaign called 'Autobiography' on Facebook which asks customers to 'Tell Your Story' and it seems that, with admirable confidence, the company is putting its faith in its satisfied customers to spread the positive word about the brand. The campaign has already attracted over 1,000 pieces of content including photos, videos and detailed stories, uploaded by satisfied Toyota customers through a Facebook app created for this purpose.
Ford is widely recognised as a global leader when it comes to embracing social channels but Toyota is well-placed to narrow the gap over the next 12 months. Overtaking Ford might be a somewhat trickier manoeuvre (sorry, couldn’t resist it).
