The result of nestle’s fan page moderator getting personal went way beyond the original issue and became the story in itself. It reminds me of the classic West Wing episode where Josh Lyman decides to comment personally on the Lemonlyman website, only to wonder why he suddenly turns from hero to villain and CJ threatens personal injury with a motherboard.

The lesson? Stick to the issues; stay focused on the facts and look for the collaborative option. The best communication is two-way and changes behaviours on BOTH sides. This is a prime example of how to get the balance completely wrong and pay the corporate consequences. Ironically, KitKat was originally a Rowntree brand – the organisation that was set up by staunch Quaker, Joseph Rowntree.  Interestingly, they were equally censorial back in the early ’80s when I was a Student at York University – York being Rowntrees’ home.  Whiel News Editor of the student mag, Nouse, we decided to run a fairly derogatory front page about Kitkat and Rowntrees latest union activities in South Africa.  Strangely, Rowntree asked us in less than polite terms to pull the publication.  Clearly we were being more than provocative and now, with corporate communication experience under my belt I can appreciate the issues of brand and reputation management.  However, a collaborative approach would have had a far better impact on student and company behaviour than heavy-handed corporate ‘big brother’.   Joseph Rowntree must be rotating gently in his grave.

A combination of diverse, yet related issues has reduced me to the point of wanting to book the very next flight across the pond, find a number of the so-called leaders of the free world/captains of global industry and beat seven shades of stupidity out of each and every one of them.  This reaction is in response to some recent news from the US political scene.

The first is a via a clever piece of writing by Martin Luz in the Huff Post about the ensuing sugar tax battle.  He talks about the war between the sugar refiners, food manufacturers and retailers and the increasingly large number (in more senses than one) of Americans try to understand why obesity is such a problem.  Within this is the role Coke is playing, using its massive Social Media PR budget to fuel the war of words and demonstrate that fructose really isn’t any worse than sugar which, as Luz so eloquently puts it, is “like saying heroin is no more addictive than cocaine”.  The potential for social media to play such a major role in dictating both social policy and consumer behaviour in a single campaign is fascinating while being, at the same time, saddening for a subject that should be a no-brainer for any rational thinking person.

Next up is the latest and, despite the spin,  apparently fruitless efforts by Barack Obama to convince Congress that the health of one of the largest populations in the world really does matter more than the shareholders in the medical insurance, hospital and pharma sectors – a point supported by civil rights campaigner, the Revd. Jesse Jackson.  For a moment, the rest of the world held its breath, believing that he might succeed where his Democrat predecessor, Bill Clinton, had failed.   He may yet, but only through a legislative loophole.   Again, to many, US healthcare reform would seem a no-brainer.

And finally comes the recent announcement by the Environmental Protection Agency that it is going to delay the implementation of emissions regulations for stationary sources and raise the previously agreed thresholds after it had received deputations from Senate Democrats.  Apparently, the Democrats are trying to pre-empt a move by the Republicans to block the legislation altogether.   The most telling comment, however, is from “industry officials” who claim that “regulating emissions such as carbon dioxide with the Clean Air Act could be overly burdensome to many energy-intensive sectors” and trotting out the “increased costs=lack of investment=lack of job creation” argument.   To which the response of any right-minded individual who cares about their health or that of the planet would be “Diddums!  It’s about time responsibility outweighed fiduciary”.

Which leads me back to my favourite TV programme.  West Wing is a superb look behind the scenes of the White House during the Clinton era – even predicting Obama’s candidacy some four years before it became a reality.  Through it’s insight I’m under no illusions about how complex major legislation creation actually is.  However, for the keen observers amongst us, I think it presents a a far greater and more fundamental  into the US’ relationship with sugar, obesity and its approach to healthcare.   Pick an episode, any episode.   Watch no more than 10 minutes and note in how many meetings there is an array of pastries, muffins and other sugar-ridden foodstuffs liberally placed on conference tables or the Oval Office sideboards.  Can you begin to imagine just how much Danish was consumed during the inconclusive 7-hour White House bi-partisan health ’summit’?  Constructive debate?  It’s a miracle those locked in the room didn’t succumb to diabetic comas… or maybe they did.

Anyway, like so many articles and items that I’m lead to by the Twitterati, I occasionally have time for the briefest glance before I realise that I need to be focusing on what pays the bills chez Net.Mentor.  However, this particular Mashable article on trust and social media really caught my attention.  It is fascinating from a psychology perspective as well as from so many other angles relating to presentation skills, response times in the social media arena, trust and brand, etc, etc.  In particular, the Domino’s Pizza believability graph – although whether the graph can be believed is questionable in itself – and the relationship between body language, content and belief in the message.

Having just completed handout notes regarding feedback for a communication workshop I’m running next week, it is good to know that my recommendation of responding quickly to feedback, even if it’s just to say ‘thanks’ in the first instance, appears to be supported by a top psychologist.

Sadly, Toyota’s brave statement is all too real as its goal of near perfection fades a little further into the distance with more than 8 million of its vehicles being recalled and questions being asked by world leaders of our supposedly super-ethical governments.

Trust me, this is not “I told you so” time!  With experience in crisis management, my head says I should feel angry that road users have been put at risk by another corporate giant trying to cover up its mistakes.  My heart is in an entirely different place.  As a former member of the Toyota (GB) PR team I can only marvel at the way Scott Brownlee and his colleagues have taken on an extraordinary task as they struggle to keep up with the deluge of information and meet the requests that face them in the battle to provide accurate information to the UK’s media.

The issue has allowed the world’s media to hunt down another global corporate giant – strangely the one which has recently become the world’s leading automotive producer with accelerated (sorry) growth at a time when the world’s economy is going to hell in a handcart (or GM vehicle); turning its insatiable search for “public interest” and the next moral panic into a feeding frenzy of high-handed hysteria.  Oh, and now the bandwagon (manufactured in America) is well and truly rolling, with news that apparently Corollas veer to the left.  I’ve been there and worn that t-shirt too in the late ’90s  -  BBC Watchdog’s Ford Sierra steering problem garbage anyone?

So is my sympathy out of misplaced loyalty, a subconscious twitch from my PR ’spin’ muscle, or something more tangible?  From experience, the public and media fantasy completely overwhelms reality and irreparable short, and possibly medium, term damage is being inflicted on Toyota’s reputation.  Sure, they have had quality issues – when you are mass producing that number of vehicles for owners who want to continually pay less and get more for the price, what do you expect?  But they admitted they had quality issues, in their starkly contrite way, nearly two years ago.  Whatever they say or do now, they can’t win.

But let’s just look at the numbers for a moment.  More than 8 million Toyotas are being recalled.  8 MILLION.  The number of worldwide reported serious incidents relating to the alleged problems will be a fraction of one percent of that figure.  Yet Toyota are recalling 8 million vehicles , with all the related costs, because of a problem that may never affect many of those cars.

As Head of Public Relations at RAC Motoring Services I was frequently under pressure to reveal the ‘most reliable/unreliable vehicle’ data.  It just doesn’t work like that!   Reliability, like car technology and the automotive industy in general, is a complex issue.  A point eloquently made by Heather Yaxley, another Toyota PR alumni, in explaining the frustrations facing the current Toyota  PRs. I can also report first-hand that, as pointed out by fellow RAC communicator Edmund King – now President of the AA – there are millions of vehicles recalled every year and many millions more that are subject to component replacement during routine servicing to rectify minor faults identified by manufacturers.  Very few motorists,  and only the better informed journalists, are even aware this happens.  It’s certainly no big deal, even if it’s a big cost for the carmaker.

In reality, regardless of how much testing is done in the lab or in quality control, some faults will only appear once a vehicle is on the road.  The good news is that almost all of these faults are picked up early – often by RAC, AA and other roadside technicians -  and manufacturers take action quickly.

In this case, Toyota have unquestionably been too slow off the mark to deal with an issue that has now incubated into a crisis.  They’re certainly not alone – look at Cadburys in 2006 with a Salmonella scare that took too long to report.   But again, look at the Toyota timeline.

While they have clearly been aware of the issues for some time, an 8 million product recall is not something that any right-minded organisation will undertake without irrefuteable evidence.  Add to that the heirarchical, procedure-driven,  and generally inflexible culture of Japanese corporations (something I’ve witnessed first-hand).  Combine it with hyper-litigious American culture fuelled by insurance urban myths, and you have a crisis waiting to happen and a virtually impossible mission for the communicatiors.  But once the tipping point of evidence plus pressure was reached, Toyota initiated a global recall and repair programme in a matter of DAYS.

But most important of all, with 3,500 road deaths and 65,000 injuries  daily on the world’s roads, it’s time to stop worrying about possibly faulty accelerators, questionably dodgy car mats and mildly inconsistent brakes.  The biggest technical threat to all of us, and the real reason people should be forced to stop driving cars whoever makes them, is the nut behind the wheel.

Learning outcomes will inevitably be much more wide ranging.   Giving learners the opportunity to play with their learning will result in a greater degree of motivation, a desire to experiment leading to truly embedded understanding. 

If there’s a queue to buy Siftables when they’re commercially released, I’ll try to be near the front!

However,  this doesn’t mean the end of the line for the professional journalist – a point well made in Jeremy Porter’s recent post.  Having trained and worked as a broadcast journalist, I know that the ability to point a mobile phone in the direction of a major event happening in front of you doesn’t automatically make you  a journalist.  It creates plenty of informed observers and that is only to be welcomed if, as in the case of Ian Tomlinson’s death during the G20 clashes in London, observational reality  can become a conduit to justice.

Major incidents, such as the Paddington rail crash, have plenty of eye witnesses who were only too keen to share their experiences on what was happening – although social media was in its infancy in 1999 when that particular event happened.  In that case there were BBC journalists travelling on the trains involved and it was they who called on to provide objective, descriptive and relatively balanced reports at the scene within minutes of the event and in subsequent news bulletins.

Although professional journalists may not always be immediately on hand for every incident, it is a safe assumption that during major, newsworthy events (the Hudson river plane crash being another example), the news-hungry public may turn to citizen journalism social media for their instant gratification, but will still rely on the professionals to undertake the gathering, filtering, editing, summarising and opinion-forming to deliver the ‘bigger picture’.

Long may it continue!

Anyway, on the upside, it would appear that the project has united the PR, Communications and Marketing teams at Coke.  Great news – it just seems a little surprising that for such a global brand, these three departments haven’t been fully engaged in communication with each other before now.  I’m also interested to know how the three differ in their roles.

Judging by comments on the article, the apparent downside may be that the ’social’  has been lost in the desire to tap into the ‘media’ .  Clearly it’s early days, and it will depend on the people skills of the Ambassadors, but social media is about dialogue.  To take a theoretical prespective, social media is arguably the easiest way to achieve Grunig and Hunt’s 2-way symmetrical communications nirvana, where dialogue positively alters the behaviours and understanding of both the target audience and the organisation.  The Explore 206 project will be an interesting experiment, but Coke needs to be careful that the Ambassadors don’t simply become Agents in a one-way sales process dressed up as two-way social media dialogue.

To be honest, I didn’t want to add to the millions of words already devoted to this subject and fuel the flames of his publicity.  But having re-watched the BBC Question Time programme and the pre and post media frenzy, I have been left feeling numbed by the ineptitude of the UK’s public service broadcaster.

Griffin is an MEP, he is elected, we live in a democracy, the BBC were right to broadcast.

Sadly, it went downhill from there.  The carefully selected panel was no surprise (although Jack Straw was surprisingly poor), neither was the make-up of the audience.  What did surprise me was just how dramatically Dimbleby and the producers prostituted themselves in their desire to ensure we knew just how ignorant and bigotted Griffin is…for more than 30 minutes…without cessation.  It took possibly 3 minutes for the point to be made (perhaps 5 for the less intelligent members of the audience).  Job done.

What was completely missed was the fact that Griffin, and his even more disturbing side-kick Andrew Brons, are in a position to influence European legislation – the implications of which reach far beyond just British shores.  If  Dimbleby hadn’t allowed the red mist and the ill advice of the BBC’s editors and senior PRs to descend, he would have realised that had he conducted the remaining 55 minutes of the programme in the usual format, Griffin and, more importantly, his party would have been exposed as the political danger they truly represent.

The Nazi thugs will always vote for Griffin and his ilk because of their misguided values.  It’s the so-called ‘protest voters’, who apparently have no-one else to vote for, that needed to be shown the true implications of what they have done by witnessing not the moral bankruptcy of the individual, but the political immorality and ineptitude of the party for which he was acting as a representative on the night.

There is no doubt in my mind that had he become imbroiled in the standard of political debate usually engendered by a ‘normal’ Question Time, he would have buried, beyond any hope of redemption, both his party and himself at every turn.  Instead, the coffin lid was left ajar and, dracula-like,  he  squeezed out and into a world of PR opportunities for himself and his party.

The panel and audience may have felt a sense of smug satisfaction at the end of the evening, but the fact that fascist extremists have been allowed to walk away with even the slightest glimmer of opportunity means the BBC has very little to be satisfied about.   I thought Dimbleby was the best man for the job.  He blew it!

Yes – music, lyrics, films, a paragraph in a book…if it’s well enough written or executed, words – or a combination of words, sound an image – can really get to me.  Sometimes it just creeps up on you and catches you by surprise, or just sums up professonal and personal life in a way that presses all the right/wrong buttons.  Like it did this morning when I was surfing around some of my regular blogs and Writing Boots came up with this one.  It’s not a new concept, but the execution is just beautifully done.

Content matters and, yes, it can even make the most cynical copywriters cry!