« Marketing: The Importance of Embracing Brand Advocates »

For the past few weeks, I've been telling some of my insurance and financial industry clients that they could learn a thing or two about brand advocacy and customer loyalty from Toyota. Most laugh, given the image fiasco Toyota endured earlier this year.

But, there's more to the story than the crazed (some may say biased) news reports and public skewering of Toyota officials in those now infamous U.S. Senate hearings. Recently, I discovered Toyota's new brand advocacy site toyotaconversations.com. Being the owner of a 2007 Prius (which I absolutley love), I was curious about how Toyota was stepping up its consumer communication efforts. What I discovered is that the site is a custom TweetMeme channel designed specifically for Toyota. The existence of this site shows that Toyota “got the message” that Toyota owners, sellers and the general public were angry and disappointed with its subpar job on the listening and communicating fronts during the recent crisis.

With toyotaconversations.com the company has taken a bold move into the world of social media. It's a move that makes the company seem more transparent, immediate, genuine and ultimately, I believe, more forgivable. The branded TweetMeme channel aggregates and organizes Twitter conversations that pertain to Toyota. These conversations are made easily accessible to consumers. Toyota, in this one bold move, is suddenly a premier example of listening and talking to brand advocates – millions of them – with greater speed and impact than any other car company I can think of. In addition to aggregating and organizing Twitter conversations, the site also provides news and resources to consumers, and curates conversations with influential bloggers.

For a closer look at the programming behind the site and its “feed moderation” (a.k.a the site seems to show more positive tweets than negative), I suggest you take a look at ReadWriteWeb.com 3/2/2010 post at titled What the Tweetmeme Toyota Portal Looks Like Under the Hood.

For a great overview of the urgency/importance of big business to embrace brand advocates in today’s social media world, look at the slideshare.net presentation below titled The Power of Brand Advocates from Lbi Belgium. The toyotaconversations.com site is featured in the presentation.