BulletProofBlog the blog on crisis communications

After weeks, even months, of mishandling its recall of a faulty gas-pedal in millions of its cars, Toyota appears to be getting its communications act in gear.

The automaker’s senior executives are now following the basic principles of crisis communications. They’re apologizing to customers, offering details on the cause of the pedal’s malfunction, providing dealers with needed replacement parts and vowing to do everything possible to prevent another such incident from happening again. In short, they are beginning to take control of the story.

Now comes the really hard part. Toyota has to keep it coming – and fast. Because of their late start in the process, the company’s leaders must intensify their outreach in the traditional media, making themselves available for print and broadcast interviews around the clock and writing sensible and honest articles for newspaper and magazine opinion pages  that clearly explain what happened and what they are doing to fix this alarming problem now and in the future.

Even more important, Toyota’s leaders must remain active participants in the digital media that national polling services like Zogby and Gallup now tell us Americans consider their most reliable sources of information. As an immediate next step, Toyota USA CEO Jim Lentz should consider posting his blog comments and making himself available for question-and-answer sessions on high-authority auto and driver blogs like thetruthaboutcars.com, autoblog and Motortrend, and in widely read general blogs like the Huffington Post and The Daily Beast. Consumers need to see the human faces and hear the human voices of Mr. Lentz and other executives who stand together and make the global carmaker what it really is.

To its credit, Toyota has a wealth of information about the recall and its actions to correct the problem on its website, www.toyota.com. But it must continually update that information and optimize connections to it from other news and information sources from around the world to ensure that consumers searching for anything on the Internet – positive or negative – about the recall, inevitably find the automaker’s web site at or near the top of the search results list.

Toyota must do all this and more because it’s now at the center of one of the most important business stories of our time. And if it doesn’t write that story, its adversaries will. In cases like these, companies that remain silent or that dole out information in irregular and tiny portions are viewed as hostile and uncaring,

In truth, Toyota has a lot to tell us about what it’s doing right. It can’t stop now.

Gene Grabowski is Senior Vice President of Crisis and Litigation at Levick Strategic Communications, the nation’s top crisis communications firm, and a contributing author to Bulletproof Blog. Connect with him @crisisguru.