Toyota Mommy Blogger PR Debacle to Be Topic for Marketing Strategist Shelly Kramer
The recent Toyota Mommy Blogger PR Debacle is to be the topic for marketing strategist (and frequent AlexanderG collaborator) Shelly Kramer, a panelist at BlogWorld and New Media Expo in New York City May 24-26.
“I’m looking forward to participating in this event for a few reasons, said Kramer, CEO of V3 Integrated Marketing headquartered in Kansas City, MO. “The foremost being it’s my first trip to BlogWorld. It’s a fantastic conference and I’m excited to get the chance to experience it.”
“I’m also looking forward to participating because my co-panelists are a bunch of the most wicked smart, successful and downright amazing people I know,” she added. “BlogWorld is very much a conference attended by thought leaders in the integrated marketing, PR and social media space, so it’s a great honor to be invited to speak.”
Kramer, who blogs on related topics at http://www.v3im.com/blog will join Ann-Marie Nichols of The Write Spot, Lucretia Pruitt of The Social Joint and Christopher Barger of Voce Communications in discussing #ToyotaFail: The Crisis that Wasn’t.
“We’ll discuss the whole #ToyotaFail ordeal and how the misguided ambition of a mommy blogger and the already struggling reputation of Toyota collided in a spectacular hot mess. We’ll look at how their social media team dealt with what could have been a full on brand crisis,” she said.
“We’ll look at the dangers of working with inexperienced bloggers and the damage that could happen to you and your brand as a result. And we’ll also discuss best practices in brand crisis management in general, including how your PR and social teams must work together and how dealing with crises in real time can make all the difference in the world,” she said.
Kramer’s panel will be meet Wednesday, May 25th from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
The world’s largest social media business conference and new media industry tradeshow, BlogWorld & New Media Expo is the first and only industry-wide tradeshow, conference and media event dedicated to promoting the dynamic industry of new media. Thousands of attendees learn about Content Creation, Distribution, Monetization and Social Media Marketing strategies, including step-by-step techniques and bleeding-edge tools from the most successful and influential Bloggers, Podcasters, Vloggers, Web TV & Radio Broadcasters, Social Influencers, New Media Pro’s and Online Journalists.
“If you can’t make it to the conference – keep an eye out for our discussion on Twitter and join in the conversation.” Hashtags are #ToyotaFail and #BWEEAST. For more information on Blogworld, visit http://www.blogworldexpo.com/2011-nyc/ .
Kramer is the CEO of V3 Integrated Marketing http://www.v3im.com , a full service digital communications agency headquartered in Kansas City, MO. A 20+ year marketing veteran, Kramer is a digital marketing specialist, content creator, speaker and web savvy geek particularly adept at helping individuals and brands find their respective voices in the realm of new media and all forms of digital communication and marketing. To the astonishment of her many mathematics professors, she’s also become partial to stats, numbers, analyses and measurement of all kinds, which is quite fortunate for her clients. Forbes has named the V3 blog as one of the Top 20 Best Marketing + Social Media Blogs and PostRank ranks the V3 blog as one of the top blogs about Marketing + Social Media.
She has written for numerous publications, including AmEx OPENForum and Mint.com and SocialTimes.com. Kramer has been named as one of the top 150 Most Influential Women on Twitter and recognized by Forbes as one of the 30 Women Entrepreneurs to Follow on Twitter. Kramer writes about marketing, brand strategies, industry trends, social media and anything else that moves her at http://www.v3im.com/blog.
Toyota Accelerates Discussion of Social Media and PR
The PR car is idling at the intersection of social media and Toyota’s response to their disastrous debacle. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) Toyota, through a series of missteps, has virtually destroyed their market growth and given their public image a flat tire. However, they’re earning points for being more forthright (even though it’s pretty late in the roadtrip) for their unvarnished use of social media in the form of “Toyota Conversations,” a site that aggregates Toyota news as well as Toyota’s Twitter updates and recall information.
Catharine P. Taylor hits the nail on the head with this simple statement:
…”given the rise of social media, jumping into a conversation when it’s most against you is perhaps the only way that a major company can appropriately handle PR these days.”
She’s right. There’s only so much good–and frankly much more damage–that a one-way conversation (read: “traditional PR”) about an event this catastrophic can do. Taylor said she has “quibbles” with the site in that it doesn’t offer Twitter comments from the public. I agree, but have to say that with a corporate culture like Toyota’s, “Toyota Conversations” is a huge step. 
In my career I’ve managed or worked on teams that handled some pretty sticky crisis com situations. Hands down the worst was when I was part of a hospital crisis communication team during the terrorist attack in Oklahoma City in 1995. The team did an incredible job under excruciatingly tough circumstances. Though not by any means the “bad guy” in that horrific event, we were still absolutely inundated with media requests and visits from agencies spanning the globe and a daily deluge of calls from victim families, their friends and concerned citizens. A large amount of our time was spent responding to misinformation and rumors.
Despite our best efforts, much of the information that made it out was incorrect, embroidered or unnecessarily dramatized (as if any drama needed to be added to that horror). Looking back, I can only imagine the positives of having the social media tools we have now to get information out, quash rumors and more effectively manage a chaotic communications event. Certainly social media would also have provided millions of “channels” for misinformation, but we would have had the ability–like the better-late-than-never-Toyota–to inform the public more effectively and perhaps alleviate much of the panic and misinformation.
