It brings out emotion and ultimately unscripted drama.

Look no further than the bevy of reality TV shows cranking out the profits to understand the appeal of NOT knowing how the story will turn out.

With this in mind, I suspect we’re going to see and read a helluva story on Monday (March 8, 2010) when according to The Wall Street Journal Toyota moves to discredit its critics.

If you want to see the imprint of Toyota hiring two well-connected D.C.-based PR agencies to shape its outbound communications, watch the fireworks on Monday.

No question, the folks from Glover Park Group and Quinn Gillespie & Associates have been busy beavers applying their version of communications honed on the political front.

According to the Journal story, Toyota will challenge the credibility of the whistleblower:

The company is providing reporters with court filings that it says show the former employee has a history of mental illness and poor performance reviews.

In fact, Toyota has already started attacking the credibility of former employee Dimitrios Biller sending an e-mail to The Journal that highlighted:

Copies of legal filings that include negative job reviews for Mr. Biller at a past employer and highlight mental-health issues.

Welcome to the Gordon Liddy school of communications (”nice” snaring job reviews from another company).

Apparently, David Gilbert, the professor from Southern University who claims to have replicated the sudden acceleration in Toyota cars without creating an error code, also stands in Toyota’s line of fire:

“The Gilbert demonstration is a hoax or a parlor trick,” said the person familiar with Toyota’s thinking…

The person familiar with Toyota’s thinking?

As if there’s only one such person.

I can’t say this comes across as stellar Journal reporting either given “the person familiar with Toyota’s thinking” is the PR person whispering in the ear of the journalist.

“The analysis of Professor’s Gilbert’s demonstration establishes that he has reengineered and rewired the signals from the accelerator pedal. This rewired circuit is highly unlikely to occur naturally and can only be contrived in a laboratory.  There is no evidence to suggest that this highly unlikely scenario has ever occurred in the real world.  As shown in the Exponent and Toyota evaluations, with such artificial modifications, similar results can be obtained in other vehicles.”

Lord knows, I’ve taken my own shots at Toyota (three to be exact with the latest being Customer Letter No 4 Loses Its Way).

But Toyota isn’t the first mega brand to suffer from the-gang-can’t-shoot-straight communications.

Given the company is the largest car maker in the world and has deposited equity in the brand karma bank for years, I assumed they would eventually bounce back.

Now, I’m not so sure.

I don’t think Mr. Toyoda and his compadres have any idea about the line they’re about to cross on Monday.

To communicate through character assassination and a smear campaign is to reach a point of no return.

When it comes to a crisis, everyone tends to fixate on the “bad press.”

I think it’s more revealing to zero in on the communications controlled by the offending company.

How are they telling their story within their control?

That’s why I find the Toyota open letters to customers so fascinating.

Just because you control the words doesn’t mean you get the story right.

Playing backseat driver, I’ve weighed in on three letters:

• Open Letter to Toyota Customers Hits Pothole
• Second Letter to Customers Stays on the Road
• Third Toyota Customer Letter Falls Flat

In aggregate, the letters haven’t been very good, which unfortunately also describes the fourth called “Our Commitment to Customers.”

The first line sets the tone:

History shows that great companies learn from their mistakes.

Gentlemen, I thought we established back in the letter No. 2 days that people don’t embrace history lessons when they’re worried about charging cars.

On the positive side, I like the idea that you’ve packaged three points for easy consumption.

On the not-so-good side, the points aren’t the right points.

First, we are fixing the vehicles covered by our recent recalls.

Talk about misreading the crowd. People kind of expect you to fix the malfunctioning vehicles.

But it’s the second point that illustrates how Toyota still views the crisis through an intellectual lens:

Toyota engineers have rigorously tested our solutions – and we are confident that no problems exist with the electronics in our vehicles.

• We’ve designed our electronic throttle control system with multiple fail-safe mechanisms to shut off or reduce engine power in the event of a system failure. And they work.
• But we’re not stopping there. We’ve asked a world-class engineering firm to conduct a comprehensive, independent analysis. Their interim report confirms that our fail-safe features work.
• Toyota will make the results of this comprehensive, independent evaluation available to the public when it is completed.

Again, we see gamesmanship with language that “no problems exist with the electronics,” meaning the rest of the car remains a wildcard.

Not good.

And you’ve got the electronic throttle control system to work, but you’re “not stopping there?” Given what’s transpired over the past few months, I would have to characterize this decision as wise but not exactly one that builds equity in the brand.

By the time you get to the third point about “transparency” you’ve lost the audience.

And the sign-off points back to Toyota’s heritage of building safe cars for 50 years.

Everyone knows Toyota has been cranking out safe cars at a good price forever. You don’t have to keep the reminders coming. Let the withdrawal from the karma bank happen naturally.

I do have one final suggestion for the Toyota gang -

Don’t write any more letters.

P.S. Quick reminder that we’re curating a “Toyota Crisis PR Resource” page which will be updated by the end of the week. If you have thoughts or content for the page, by all means send them my way.

I rarely address fiction in this blog.

While many of the same concepts apply to storytelling in business, there’s still a gulf between the two disciplines.

But Sarah Lafferty pointed me to a book of Kurt Vonnegut short stories published after his death. The introduction includes what Vonnegut calls “Creative Writing 101,” which offers sound advice for storytellers of all ilk:

1.Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Yes, Mr. Vonnegut can write even when he’s pulling together storytelling tips for us mortals.

I particularly like No. 6 and the point that “no matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them.”

The beauty of storytelling in business is you don’t have to fabricate “awful things” to confront executives. They happen on their own … as the President of Toyota Akio Toyoda will attest.

Instead, the question for communications professionals becomes how much to disclose.

The standard company line is always “little if any.”

The suits are linear thinkers; i.e., the word “awful” brings a negative connotation and we don’t want the company associated with negatives.

But it’s your executive or executives overcoming the bad stuff - even things that might have been self induced - which in turn creates the drama of a good story.

As Vonnegut puts it, how your characters respond to the “awful things” allow the reader to “see what they are made of.”

So it is in the business world.

Your customers, employees and prospects want to see what you’re made of.

]]> http://www.ishmaelscorner.com/2010/03/01/creative-writing-101-from-kurt-vonnegut/feed/ http://www.ishmaelscorner.com/2010/02/25/storytelling-140-characters-at-a-time-not/ http://www.ishmaelscorner.com/2010/02/25/storytelling-140-characters-at-a-time-not/#comments Thu, 25 Feb 2010 19:11:55 +0000 Lou Hoffman http://www.ishmaelscorner.com/?p=161 I’ve got the Twitter religion.

I’ve experienced its power in the form of crowd sourcing, research and new connections.

But Twitter is not a platform for storytelling.

Mark Drapeau who pens the blog Cheeky Fresh makes this very point in Microstorytelling Overkill and the Conundrum of the Exciting Event (must be nice to not have to optimize headlines for SEO).

… I was thinking about the way in which the story of the Russian Tech Delegation (#RusTechDel) was being told primarily through Twitter. (Some activities were livestreamed through Kutcher’s UStream channel, as long as his iPhone had battery power, that is.)

At some points, some participants were tweeting something every couple of minutes. And in some cases participants were retweeting other participants. What’s the “right” number of tweets? Everyone has to decide that for themselves. But for me, as a member of the audience, I found this somewhere between confusing and annoying.

Drapeau goes on to say:

The #RusTechDel “exciting event story” is just one of many examples of recent experiences I’ve had with social media storytelling, or attempts at it. A year ago, few people used tools like Twitter, and so only one person might be live-tweeting an event – making their information rare and valuable. Now however, we often see modest or extreme versions of Paul Carr’s “Look at me, looking at this” syndrome, in which people feel compelled to drop every thought they have into a tweet, with almost no regard for the audience they are presumably trying to reach.

The reader shouldn’t have to work to extract the story.

Plus, you can’t develop pace in 140 character bursts.

Cruise through the following tweets as a mini experiment:

Hard luck fisherman, old I might add, paints solitary figure alone in his skiff #noluck

Think there’s a boy with the fisherman

No, the boy was only there the first 40 days; old man has been there 84 days

Thought the old man had been there for a good 90 days

Could swear the old man spent some time in Motown via @cheech

I heard the boy’s parents made him leave #toughlove

The boy’s parents liked the old fisherman, but saw opp for boy to catch another ship which landed three good fish the 1st wk #bait

It’s terrible that you can’t eat fish without worrying about the #mercury levels. #protest

One could argue that it’s downright cruel for parents to make their kids eat fish

Check out SCAT (Stop Cruelty Against Tuna) on Facebook. http://bit.ly/91fWE1

You have a better chance of getting hit by a bus than dying of mercury in the bloodstream.

The boy still cares about the old man

I don’t know. The boy seems pretty happy in his new “ride.” #pimpmyride

I’m telling you- the boy is big-time sad each day when he sees the old man return empty handed.

Here’s another proof point- the boy always goes down to help the guy carry his coiled lines.

I saw the sail … pathetic #tiger.

I agree with @ernest- saw the boy help carry the gaff and harpoon and even the sail furled around the mast.

Pathetic but functional #rachelray.

If it’s pathetic, it’s not functional. If it’s functional, it’s not pathetic. That’s my deep sea thinking for the day

From what I could sea (clever), the sail was patched with flour sacks; looked like the flag of permanent defeat (think Duvall in #ApocalypseNow).

@Rachel_Ray Just uploaded a rice pilaf recipe on my Yum-O site that is pathetically functional http://www.yum-o.org/

That’s what the first paragraph of “Old Man and the Sea” looks like tweeted.

Painful.

Disjointed.

Even Mr. Hemingway’s famed economy with language fails in a 140-character frame.

I rest my case.

Twitter doesn’t work for storytelling.

The title says it all, “Storytelling and Your Quest for Business Success.”

It’s rare for a magazine to examine the power of storytelling in business. This particular article comes compliments of the trade book One +, which caters to more than 30,000 meeting planners.

Before you scoff, consider the plight of meeting planners in matchmaking an organization with a venue. No doubt, if you’ve seen one convention center, you’ve seen them all (only the dimensions change).

Enter storytelling as a means to grab the audience by the scruff of the neck.

Writer Jason Hensel bravely kicks off the piece with a cliche that works as a stage setter:

One upon a time. Need I go further? You know you’ve entered a story. Perhaps you prefer something a little more straightforward: “Call me Ishmael,” “I am an invisible man” or “Mother died today.” The simple act of telling a story demands attention whether it starts with the fantastical or the concrete. It’s the difference between academic and business-speak and barroom banter.

He had me at “Ishmael.”

Hensel spoke with Pat Lencioni, author of several popular business books including “Death by Meeting.” Hard to argue with the writer behind “a cure for the most painful yet underestimated problem of modern business: bad meetings,” who shares:

I think that people today are more distracted than ever. People are looking for something that captures their attention and provides an enjoyable experience.

Thank you.

Splattering a screen with a mind-numbing array of charts and graphs is not an enjoyable experience.

I was also pleased that my perspective on the importance of context in storytelling found its way into the narrative:

“Take the movie Rudy. If you jump to the end of the movie and see Rudy finally going into the game to play for Notre Dame, this has zero meaning. Instead, one needs to understand he originally got rejected, parlayed a [junior college] stint into admissions, walked on to the team as an undersized player, etc.

This is a big part of storytelling and especially relevant in markets of complexity like technology. Too often companies want to jump right to the innovation instead of providing context of how this was accomplished before. It’s the delta between what was and what is that delivers the drama.

And I like how Hensel puts a bow on the piece in closing:

The stories may all begin and end differently, but they all have the same core—we are one. The human story is the only story there is, and when you understand that, you’ll be able to move freely in any world, from barroom to boardroom.

Every pundit and his brother has weighed in with a view. The local NBC affiliate was in our office today to interview our crisis guru John Radewagen.

So I’ll keep my view brief.

The statement on Tiger’s Web site doesn’t lead me to believe that tomorrow will have a happy ending:

Tiger Woods will be speaking to a small group of friends, colleagues and close associates at 11:00 a.m. EST on Friday at the TPC Sawgrass Clubhouse in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. Tiger plans to discuss his past and his future, and he plans to apologize for his behavior.

It sounds like he’s hanging out with the guys over beers.

I also think it’s the wrong move to not field questions after he speaks.

Yes, I understand as articulated on his Web site that “Tiger feels that what happened is fundamentally a matter between him and his wife.” By not fielding questions he hopes to control the tawdry side of this ”little” crisis.

His quandary is that the more he strives to control tomorrow, the less likely he’s going to come across as sincere and truly apologetic.

Because a Q&A session forces Tiger to be Tiger.

You can’t script questions.

There is one move Tiger could make that would absolutely show remorse.

If he shared that he continues to need more time to focus on his family and, as a result, won’t be playing in the Master’s this year.

That would show the man’s serious about rehab.

There’s nothing more precious to Mr. Woods than winning more major titles than Jack Nicklaus.

If he was willing to give up a shot at the next major, the making of “Tiger, The Sequel” could begin.

As a refresher, I worked with Rob Moes who was VP of marketing for Philips in the mid 1980s. During an interview at COMDEX, a reporter pressed Moes for projections on how many CD-ROM drives would be sold looking out five years. Rob responded “That’s like asking Mrs. Magellan how many lunches to pack.”

That’s why I call these fresh quotes culled from recent publications “Moes Takes.”

Here’s Round II.

“If you’re going to climb Mount Everest, you can’t do it with gym shorts and sneakers.”

Alan E. Salzman, Chief Executive, Vantage Point Venture Partners
Venture Capitalist Dick Kramlich’s Last Stand
BusinessWeek (January 21, 2010)

It’s not enough to be clever. Accuracy counts too. I challenge anyone to find a photo depicting Sir Edmund Hillary in gym shorts and sneakers.

Dulled-down version:

“If you’re going to address a major challenge, it’s important to prepare properly.”

Thank you Amy Gooch for sending along the following:

If there’s one place the proletarian can visualize the bobbing of a cork in water and recognize something dodgy has transpired, it’s the UK.

Dulled-down version:

“Instead of changing his mind, David Cameron should make and communicate his decision to the British people.”

Next up:

“I am certainly not an acolyte or even a fan of the Holy Church of the Carbon-Free Atmosphere or its leader, the Reverend Al Gore.”

T.J. Rogers, CEO, Cypress Semiconductor
CleanTech: Silicon Valley’s Next Great Wave of Innovation
San Jose Mercury News (January 30, 2010)

T.J. Rogers knows how to turn a phrase, which explains a profile that belies niche semiconductor status. I haven’t seen him bust out the religious terminology since ‘96 when he publicly crushed a nun for questioning the diversity of his board.

Dulled-down version:

“I do not support the initiative for a carbon-free environment or the leaders of this movement.”

And last, from the sports world:

“They say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but what if the tree is on a hill?”

Jim Irsay, Owner of the Indianapolis Colts
A Jam Session with Jim Irsay
Sports Illustrated (January 25, 2010)

I like this one because it shows how you can take a cliche and make it fresh by adding one simple twist.

Dulled-down version:

“According to the saying, sons are like their fathers, but there are exceptions.”

If an extraordinary quote catches your attention, please e-mail it my way (lhoffman at hoffman dot com).

Alexandre Bilodeau winning Canada’s first gold medal in the men’s freestyle moguls on Sunday got me thinking.

Every Olympics reveals terrific human interest stories such as Bilodeau and his inspiration coming from his disabled older brother. You certainly don’t need a media kit to write up Team U.S.A.’s historic beat-down of the Russian hockey team at the 1980 Winter Olympics.

But these high-drama moments don’t occur on a daily basis, which begs the question:

How is the Vancouver Organizing Committee, affectionately dubbed VANOC, facilitating storytelling at the games beyond the athletes?

For answers, I took a look at the media centre on the official Winter Olympics Web site and was greeted with the words:

These resources help tell the story of the 2010 Winter Olympic games.

Encouraged, I pulled up the “Quick Facts about the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games” (under media kits)  expecting compelling information, anecdotes and perhaps an obscure tidbit or two. Instead, nine pedistarian facts came to the fore:

17 days of Olympic Games events

10 days of Paralympic Games events

5,500 Olympic Games athletes and officials (projected)

1,350 Paralympic Games athletes and officials (projected)

80+ countries participating in Olympic Winter Games

40+ countries participating in Paralympic Winter Games

10,000 media representatives

3 billion worldwide television viewers

75 million visits worldwide to vancouver2010.com (projected)

Of all the documents in the media centre, the one with the most promise proved to be the backgrounder on ice making, which started:

The Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games will see the world’s best winter athletes compete on the coolest fields of play: ice. Making great competition ice is not an easy task. It requires the world’s top ice makers, known as ice meisters, as well as state-of-the-art ice making equipment and a dedicated team of specialists whose job is to maintain perfect surfaces for figure skaters, speed skaters, short track speed skaters, curlers, wheelchair curlers, sliders, ice hockey and ice sledge hockey players.

I had no idea the temperature of the ice varies depending on the competition.

For example, figure skating ice is the softest of the Olympic ice surfaces at −3° C which helps skaters dig in for jumps and spins. In contrast, speed skating ice can be as cold as −9° C since it’s all about speed as opposed to grip.

Good stuff.

I also liked the concept of ice meisters. The backgrounder goes on to identify the ice meister for speed skating, the ice meister for curling, etc.

With that said, they could have humanized the story by sharing how each of these ice meisters came by their gifts. Perhaps one was a prodigy, complaining about the density of ice cubes in his or her soda pop at a young age.

In spite of this deliverable, the vast majority of content in the media centre is a tad dry.

VANOC did work out an arrangement with the AFP news service to feed stories to the site under the News section (not technically part of the media centre). This means for every drab release on how to clear security or the revenue generated from Olympic swag, we also get stories such as “Women Lugers Bemoan Abnormal Child’s Start:”

Customer letter No. 3 from Toyota arrived on the scene today.

Like the previous two - analyzed in “Open Letter to Toyota Customers Hits Pothole” and “Toyota’s Second Letter to Customers Stays on the Road,” this letter was published in major dailies and on the company’s Web site.

Unfortunately, the third time was not a charm for Toyota.

The headline offers a promising start: “Toyota’s Pledge To You.”

But before going further, let me ask you a question. If someone says I’m making a pledge to you, what do you expect to follow?

Right.

You expect to learn about the actual content of this pledge.

Not Toyota.

Instead, the initial paragraph takes a drive down nostalgia lane:

More than 70 years ago, Toyota was founded with one mission in mind — to provide our customers with the safest, most reliable vehicles in the world. That’s why 80% of all Toyota cars and trucks sold in the United States over the last 20 years are still on the road today.

At least the second paragraph shows a modicum of empathy:

We’re proud of our heritage and recognize that, lately, we haven’t lived up to it. All 172,000 Toyota employees and dealership personnel in North America are working around the clock to make things right for you and earn back your trust.

But the core of the body copy, which consists of four bullet points under the subhead “Here’s what we are doing” really just rehashes customer service basics.

The third bullet in particular caught my attention:

When we learn about a problem our customers are experiencing, we’ll investigate without delay, and we’ll quickly address any safety issues we find.

For the second time in three posts, “Huh?”

Customers are supposed to be impressed that NOW you’re going to “quickly address any safety issues …”

I’m going out on the limb and predicting this “magnanimous” gesture is not going to win a whole lot of goodwill.

Even with Toyota’s volume discount, the ads in The Wall Street Journal alone are running around $200K a pop. It’s baffling with so much on the line they can’t get the narrative right.

Yet, take a look at how the letter closes:

And we believe that the best companies learn from their mistakes. We know we need to do better. We are committed to doing just that.

Bravo.

This is how the letter should have started, not ended.

P.S. We took a shot at building and curating a “Toyota Crisis PR Resource” page. If you have thoughts or content for the page, by all means send them my way.

Instead of addressing the issue head on, Toyota started the letter harking back to its 50-year heritage.

The narrative went downhill from there.

I don’t think Toyota was particularly proud of the letter either given it’s no longer on the web site (although it does show up in the image library).

I’m convinced every crisis reaches a fork in the road in which a company must make a choice on who’s leading the charge, legal or common sense.

It was clear from scrutinizing Toyota’s Open Letter that legal had won the tug of war and I expected legal would set the tone for what remains of the debacle.

So it was with utter surprise that I read the latest Toyota letter again running in major dailies like the Wall Street Journal and USA Today as well as on their web site.

It shows, dare I say, common sense.

I’m sure Toyota didn’t dump the attorneys but all of the sudden common sense appears to have the final say.

For starters, they didn’t title the piece “A Second Open Letter to Customers.”

Instead, they get right down to business in plain language with the 84-point headline:

“There’s been a lot of talk about the recall. Here are the facts for our customers”

Straight forward and the line “Here are the facts for our customers” is much stronger than the typical default “Here are the facts.”

The body copy kicks off with the same no-nonsense tone:

Over the past few days, there has been a lot of speculation about the sticking accelerator pedal recall. Our message to Toyota customers is this – if you are not experiencing any issues with your accelerator pedal, we are confident that your vehicle is safe to drive.

Toyota has recognized the drivers with the problem might be a lost cause. Instead, their primary focus has shifted to the “99 percent” with cars still humming along.

Of course, the drivers in the clear still need to see Toyota take accountability for the problem.

I like the fact that Toyota got rid of the silly language. A phrase such as “a convenient appointment” now simply appears as “an appointment”

There’s also a certain crispness that was missing in the first letter; i.e., “dealerships have extended their hours” instead of the lame “many of our dealers will be working extended hours.”

And the superfluous pontificating – lines like “Some of the actions we’ve taken are unprecedented” – has completely disappeared.

It’s not nearly as much fun critiquing effective writing but Toyota deserves credit for course correcting their communications.

Let’s see if common sense remains in the driver’s seat (tough to resist those car metaphors).

Side note: Toyota assigned the same URL of the first letter (http://www.toyota.com/recall/ToyotaCustomerLetter.pdf) to the second letter. The beauty of this maneuver is it essentially wipes out the virtual trail of the original offending copy.

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