Toyota Conversations lack transparency

Filed under: Innovation

Innovating with social media to promote organisational transparency is all the rage at the moment. While Smoothmedia encourages clients to experiment with these techniques, many campaigns are let down, ironically, by a lack of transparency.

Case in point is Toyota. As the brand's reputation for safety and reliability was battered by a series of recalls, the Japanese car giant called for a full global inquiry and launched a branded channel on TweetMeme called 'Toyota Conversations'.

On the surface this attempt to turn to Twitter to pull back the covers of what the public is saying about the brand is laudable. But it fails at the crucial stage of revealing the filters and configuration of the TweetMeme stream. Toyota has clearly allowed certain content providers into the stream while barring others. This can be seen by pulling up Twitter and searching for Toyota at the same time as viewing the emerging tweets on Toyota Conversations. Clearly the majority of the public tweets about Toyota are not included in the official 'conversation'. Nowhere on the site does it indicate what criteria Toyota is using to select or filter the Twitter sources. The current general negative sentiment about the brand is buffered by mostly institutional media providers in the stream. So much for transparency. And it begs the question of what is the point?

This also speaks to a major criticism of the mainstream media that has recycled and reported how innovative Toyota are without considering if this is simply a cynical attempt to appear transparent. In that sense the Toyota PR campaign can be considered a success but as literacy of these tools evolves (even one day reaching the far corners of mainstream media offices) so too will recognition of the relative match between the stated aim and the actual implementation. That's what real public transparency is all about. Go hard or don't go at all.