Crisis in Toyota

The first manufacturer of cars in the world, Toyota, has not started very well this year. The owner of the company, Akio Toyoda, has had to apologise for the problems of the accerelator in his cars, appear in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) the last month and check approximately 9 millions of cars around the world. The next video explains perfectly the problem and the consequences for the company.

In 2008, some clients in Europe and EEUU complained about problems with the accelerators of their cars, since the accelerator pedal did not return to the initial position when the drivers stopped to accelerate, so it was impossible to control the car. This fault could be the reason of 34 deaths in car accidents in EEUU.

How did Toyota manage the crisis situation? They did not do anything until four weeks ago when the owner of the company apologised after two weeks that the crisis broke and they published one video in YouTube.

Last month one article of the PRWeek analized the video, and another one the attitude of the company in this situation and they described it like a "easygoing attitude" and "incredibly reactive". Moreover, they advise to Toyota to change the PR vision of the company, since I think that in these kind of cases is necessary to speak with the media as soon as possible to explain the problem and give a solution if it is possible, not wait two weeks when the image of the company has just suffered.

But Toyota has not only this problem, the brakes of the Toyota Prius has caused one car accident with two injured and a lot of driver´s complains, how is Toyota going to react in view of this new crisis?

Image: www.autodescuento.com

Be careful with your comments!

Reading the last week the digital version of El Mundo, the second newspaper with more circulation in Spain, I saw one blog about technology called "El Catalejo".

The post of the day was focused on the opening of a new tool of search of Google after several months of practices. Now Google gives the possibility of the users of finding not only web pages, blogs or images, also comments in Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and FriendFeed. You can see one example in this video.

The post discusses about the problem of publishing your personal comments in a search engine because, can a machine distingues between a joke and a private comment? Are my comments with my friends important in the search of other people? The author accuses the social media of not having a good privacy policy because one thing is that you can communicate via Twitter, in an open space, and another is that your comments appears in the screen of millions of users in Google.

After reading that, I wanted to try it. I searched "Real Madrid" in Google and I found several "tweets" about the match of yesterday against the Getafe:

I entered in Twitter and I wrote a comment about the topic, because I wanted to know if it is going to appear or not. This was the result, I was frigthtened, I am the first one in the list:

This experiment has thought to myself about if we are preparing to the social media (why are we frightened when Google publishes our comments and not when we have our profile in Facebook or Twitter opened to everybody?) and if we know the importance of our actions when we use them (why are worried when our name appears in Google and not for example in Facebook where all our data appear?)

Twitter´s @anywhere

This week thousand of technology websites and blogs published the news about the new project of Twitter, @anywhere.

On Tuesday 16th, Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, presented this new application during "South by Southwest Interactive Conference", in Texas.

This new service allows to the users write their comments in Twitter without enter inside the program, otherwise while they are connected to other web sites like YouTube, eBay, The New York Times or Amazon, they can leave their comments. Moreover, this application allows to the users to see information about one person or company which has a Twitter account, without leaving the web sites that they are visiting, when they put their mouse on the link, a pop-up will open and they can see information about this link, like for example, the last "tweets" of one account, Williams explained that with one example.

This new application of Twitter is an example that the social media continue to advance and not everything is just done.


Picture: http://www.muyinternet.com/

Educate using social media

Nowadays, when we think about social media like Facebook or Twitter, we only see the funny point of view: share photos, comment the wall of our friends, keep in touch with the world every second, etc., but I think that it is time to introduce these tools in the education of teenagers and university students (under and postgraduated).

Social media could provide a lot of vantage in an university class: more participation of the alumni, research of examples in the web, share of contents outside the class and the most important aspect, knowledge about how to use in a responsible way these tools. One experiment about social media in the University is showed in this video.

After seven years at a Spanish University where I studied a little bit of Photoshop, editing video and audio, blogs and Microsoft Office, I did not learn anything about social media. Is Microsoft Office Word the future or the social media? Nowadays, everybody knows more or less how to use Microsoft Office and how to send e-mails, but not how to use the new tools that Internet provides, and I think that this gap could be cover for the new PR practitioners. We do not need the same preparation than practitioners ten years ago, the technology is changing everyday.

I think that the introduction of social media in the University and High School could get better the formation of the future proffesionals and moreover, teach to these target of people how to use them, because the majority learn alone and they do not have any idea about the power of these tools.

For all these reasons I think that social media should be a compulsary subject.

Picture: http://www.webintenta.com/Iconos/6/

Was it a real press conference?

Three months after the car accident, Tiger Woods did his first press conference to speak about the sexual scandal, is it not a lot of time of waiting? I think that it would be better after the hospital to speak with the media and say the thruth, because in theses three months the journalists only received rumours and wrote about speculations and the lovers´stories of Tiger. Would be better attack the theme in the first days?

In the press conference Tiger did not allow questions and only three wire reporters were in the room. Is it a real press conference or only a speech? In think that he lost a good opportunity to finish this theme because, is it better receive these kind of questions in his first appearance in a golf court?

After looking the video of the press conference several times, it seems like a speech of a politician, everything is too prepare, I can not see any feelings. For me, it was only his firts step to come back to a golf court, starting with the appearance again in the media and trying to achieve new sponsors and recover old ones, promising that he will be the perfect sportman, husband, father, son, etc., again, this that the companies want to their image.

Is this a good example of how to behave in a crisis case? For me definitely no.

Picture: Mundo52