GOSO

By: Ryan Riley Marketing Strategy Manager for GOSO. Ryan provides analytical data and departmental support for GOSO. Ryan is an experienced writer and blogs for GOSO, BOALT and other sites.

Scott DeYager, Social Media Manager at Toyota Motor Sales, spoke at the Thought Leadership Summit last month where he shared some of Toyota’s social media successes during their recall. Most would consider a recall to be a public relations nightmare, but Toyota survived, thanks in part to their social media savvy on Facebook, Twitter and the unexpected Digg Dialogg.

“It’s what I like to call a crowd-sourced interview,” said Scott DeYager describing the Digg Dialogg platform.

Digg Dialogg was born from Digg.com as a way to give communities access to industry leaders. Whether it be in the arts, government or the business industry. Toyota had been approached by Digg to participate in a live interview on the Dialogg platform.

“It was a golden opportunity to be transparent and to humanize the brand when we desperately needed it,” DeYager said.

The Digg community was given three days to ask any question of Jim Lentz, President/COO of Toyota Motor Sales, USA, and over the course of the three days use Digg’s thumbs up/thumbs down functionality to move questions up or down. At the end of the three days the ten questions with the most Diggs would be posed to Lentz in a live interview two hours after the questions closed.

“When the questions closed I was actually shocked to see that Jim Lentz had received over 1,400 questions. More than Timothy Geithner and a few less than Al Gore during his Digg Dialogg,” DeYager said.

Toyota’s Dialogg was the first over a topical news item. Other Dialoggs were of celebrities and politicians like Peter Jackson, Grant Hill, and President Bill Clinton.

“This was one of those moments, as a company, that you have to give up control to be in control. I’ll be honest, not everyone in the company was confident with what we were about to do, but the results speak for themselves,” DeYager said.

Surprisingly, six of the top ten questions had nothing to do with the recall. The number one question was: What do you drive? And the simple answer is Lentz drives a Lexus RX Hybrid.

In the next five days the interview received over 1 million views.