Toyota's reputation restoring cost has became really high in spite of a really solid philosophy. One of the best thing Toyota has is their productivity cycles which is considered an example to follow by other companies and a must-be-discussed topic in any business school program. I am talking about Kaizen or "improvement" or "change for the better" following its meaning roots.
I have learned a lot from Toyota's Kaizen all these years and the fact they based it directly from Zen philosophy makes me wonder was it they couldn't interpolate these philosophy to higher executive level via effective utility functions who didn't know how promote a corporate responsibility culture or was just a corporate mistake?
The price to restore its reputation seems to be high that without counting turn over and lawsuits. They are looking for now other fast and more efficient low cost ways to restore their corporate image.Toyota repairs itself now in the Social Media Garage.
Twitter for example, is becoming an effective public relations tool for Toyota after its brand damage according to recent news. Toyota is now seriously entering the field of social media and are trying out Twitter via Tweetmeme channel, set up by http://toyotaconversations.com according to the LA Times (source here), eventhough they are really really concern after the scandal and maybe knowing that Twitter the tool they are trying first can also be a way to continuing damaging their image just as happened to Southwest Airlines and Director Kevin Smith, you can read they story here
Crisis Managers need to learn how to tweet based on a proper Key Factors of Enterprise Knowledge alignment. I think and they should be really careful on not to imitate Johnson & Johnson's corporate mistake when dealing with the Chicago-area Tylenol poisoning case back in the early 1980's and at least hasn't blamed others for their mistakes, maybe also thinking not to commit Ford's mistake when blaming Bridgestone in the past, J&J is using several blogs nowadays all of them connected to Corporate Twitter Accounts, based on this the Society for New Communications Research recently stated that 95 Fortune 500 companies have public blogs most of them connected everyday more to Twitter.
This is more or less how Twitter would be linked to Corporate activities, otherwise it would be the opposite of what is expected, it will just be Tweeting without a strategy, comments or suggestions to enrich it are always welcome:
Through Utility Functions in charge of monitoring all tweets and will be in charge of promoting the organizational culture as well, APIs are good tools:
