Social Net Hotsheet

Does Anybody Get It? How Twitter Can Help Or Hurt Your Brand

Toyota is the just the most recently visible company to fall behind in the battle for Customer Love on Twitter.

Companies just can't afford to lay low and hope to stay below the radar of either consumers, pundits, stockholders or regulators.  The twittersphere is still active - just check for #toyota and #recall.

Toyota, and other manufacturers, have survived recalls before.  It's the PR and CRM damage that takes them down from their pedestals.

Toyota's tardy and uninformative responses winds up making them looking greedy, calculating, deceitful and clueless when their public is spreading information, disinformation, opinions, speculations and lies at the nanosecond speed of interthought via twitter, facebook, blogs and other social media.

As the Big Money reports,

Anyone with access to the Internet is now a micro-Nader, an antlike information-gathering-and-broadcasting agent who can contribute his experiences and interpretations to the data stream.

Back in the good old days, Ford, GM, and Audi survived recall disasters just by being big and having PR and political clout. Sure, the Pinto and Corvair were toast (so to speak), but the companies marched on.

Is Toyota big enough to survive in internet time, or will a million tweets come home to roost?