The Tiger Woods brand consistently delivered on its expectations — integrity, dignity, determination, competitive fire and loyalty — on and off the golf course.  The brand experience was highly attractive to be repeated by fans, endorsers, news media and even his competitive foes, all telling of great stories and experiences with anything Tiger.

For Toyota, quality was the axis of its brand. The automaker entered the U.S. market decades ago amid a storm of skepticism on reliability, and Toyota quickly and has since silenced the naysayers, albeit until recently.

In produce, character is often reflected in the quality of products delivered to customers and consumers alike — freshness, taste and appearance — and in environmental stewardship, labor relations and food safety standards.

Read more thoughts in The Packer on what leaders in produce, and any other industry, can learn from Tiger and Toyota.

All communications/PR professionals know that speed is a job requirement in this industry, but speed and accuracy don’t necessarily always go hand in hand.

In my first year here at NST, I was given the nickname “Maverick” (a nod to the fighter pilot in Top Gun) by our resident quality control guru for focusing on speed, and at times overlooking details in my writing. But through our internal writing workshop, three-step quality control process and subtle reminders from Mike Rose (see photo), I’ve kicked my nasty little habit. But it appears, I’m not alone.

My not-so-subtle reminder to take the time needed to write effectively and accurately.

In order to remain competitive in the increasingly crowded media landscape, the race to be the first outlet to cover breaking news is cutthroat – and the proliferation of social media has only heightened the importance of speed when it comes to reporting.

But does speed come at a cost? That’s what the folks at the Columbia Journal Review wanted to find out. The magazine took a look at 665 consumer magazines and surveyed the outlets regarding their editing/fact checking practices and profitability of their Web sites.

The findings left many a mouth agape during our weekly staff meeting, where this information was initially shared with the NST team.

Here are some of the survey results we found interesting:

• Only one-third of the Web sites were profitable.
• 48 percent of outlets had less stringent standards when copy editing online articles versus print.
• 11 percent of outlets didn’t copy-edit their online articles at all.
• The majority of the magazines surveyed applied the same fact-checking standards to both print and online articles, but 27 percent were less stringent with online articles and 8 percent didn’t fact check online content at all.
• Another 8 percent of responding magazines didn’t fact check either their print or online articles.
• Regarding corrections, 45 percent of the Web sites changed factual errors without notifying site visitors about the correction.

Naturally, these findings make us question the standards used for online reporting, but researchers seem happy to simply shed light on the issue for now. As communications professionals, it means we all need to continue our diligence to ensure accuracy and monitor coverage closely to protect our clients’ best interests. Even if it means slowing down and turning in “your wings.”

(And for a little dose of nostalgia – Top Gun: The Need for Speed)

It’s no secret that social media is being used everywhere – from people updating their Facebook profiles from their smart phones to companies creating social media campaigns and engaging with consumers on Twitter.  That’s why at Nuffer, Smith, Tucker, we’re lucky to have Teresa Siles on our team, our firm’s director of social media and recent recipient of the word-of-mouth marketing certificate from the Word of Mouth Marketing Association.

The Word of Mouth and Social Media Marketing Certificate Program is a six-week Webinar curriculum with courses such as “Word of Mouth & Ethics” and “Requirements for Successful Social Media Tools & What Not To Do.”  All instructors are social media and marketing industry leaders who have become influencers due to their success in the arena – a feat Teresa has truly achieved since joining NST in 2001 as an intern.  Teresa is not only a two-time graduate of WOMM-U or “Word of Mouth Marketing University,” but she has also helped lead our firm’s interactive and social media efforts for many clients.  By incorporating new strategies and best practices that she has learned as part of the certificate program into future campaigns, Teresa will continue to drive NST’s social media capabilities, which range from social media monitoring to strategic outreach on sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

To learn more about Teresa’s “lessons learned” in social media, check out her past posts on the certificate program, including topics on social media strategy, Web design for Web 2.0,  blogger outreach and the effectiveness of social media.

Explore, Evaluate and Engage

We’ve already talked about first making sure social media is an appropriate tactic to support your marketing, communications and branding strategies.  Creating a Twitter or Facebook page because it makes you look young and cool is hardly a strategic decision.  As Dan Schawbel, author of Me 2.0 notes, “the single biggest mistake people make is that they either brand themselves just for the sake of doing it or that they fail to invest time in learning about what’s in their best interests.”  First, you’ll want to explore what people are saying about your brand in the social space, evaluate how open your company is to criticism and whether you have the resources to manage the page, then engage with people in a way that’s transparent and adds value to others.

Consistent Communication

Consistency is king in social media.  Everything from your “About” or “Bio” section to what messages you post should be consistent with other communication, and you should engage on a regular basis (without posting too often).  Multiple personalities from one source don’t work well in social media.  Creating a “social media voice” that provides consistency in style and tone will allow your brand to communicate consistently across various platforms.  It’s important to consult multiple departments of your business (not just marketing) to help create it, too.  The voice should be consistent with your corporate culture, within the legal guidelines of your company and the social media space, and appropriate for the audience you’re trying to reach.

Give a Little, Get a Lot

Don’t just allow fans, friends and followers to talk to you online.  Engage with them in two-way dialogue and allow them to help shape your brand.  If you’re going to be on multiple social media platforms, give people unique content on each.  Once you have a presence, you’ll want to decide how you’ll measure success.  How do you do that?  That we’ll save for another post …

Tiger Woods spent about 14 minutes doing what he should have done nearly three months ago: he took his head out of the sand trap and decided to address his crisis head-on, albeit in a tightly controlled environment.

Better late than never, and we can spend hours rehashing the premise of acting quickly to manage a crisis (hundreds did it when news broke last fall, myself included, and more will berate him for waiting too long).  What Tiger did accomplish today was take that critical first step down the longest fairway of his life.  Rather than jump on the bandwagon and dissect everything he did wrong in his “no-questions-asked press conference,” here’s a look at what did well:

• Pulling his head out of the sand.  Crisis management is pure hell loaded with fear and uncertainty for any organization, let alone one individual, unaccustomed to dealing with panic.
• Acknowledging it was his own behavior and actions that led to his tarnished image and brand.  He didn’t make excuses and took accountability.
• Pointing out he veered from his personal set of values.  Very few in a crisis situation get this, that reputations and brands are built and will fall based on values.
• Admitting the impact of his actions on others, particularly his wife and kids; additionally, his fans – children in particular, topping it off with acknowledging he failed as a role model (Charles Barkley be damned).
• Asking to believe in him, not right away, but over time.  Tiger knows he needs to regain trust, from his family, from the corporate sponsorship world, from his peers and from his fans – and he also knows that’s a feat that won’t happen simply in the days and weeks ahead.  It will be his actions over a longer period of time – off the course.

Check out this interview on KUSI News on Tiger Woods’ first public appearance http://bit.ly/dff9ei

The Wall Street Journal published an article last month focusing on trends in strategic planning that suggested the tactic is losing favor among today’s executives, who are opting for a more flexible approach to deal with the ever-fluctuating economy.

So, are we witnessing the death of strategic planning? Actually, it’s quite the opposite. Businesses and professionals that effectively use strategic planning to help achieve their future vision and long-term goals are constantly revisiting their plans – quarterly, monthly, sometimes even weekly – to evaluate their performance in the short term. Strategic plans were never designed to sit on a shelf and collect dust, but instead are a tool by which executives can weigh day-to-day decisions to ensure the business stays on track toward achieving it’s vision for the future.

In any industry, there will be variables that impact business – market fluctuations, shifts in industry, consumer perception, crisis situations – but planning for these changes and weighing the organization’s reaction to these variables against a solid strategic plan will help the business come out of volatile times even stronger.

For a blessing-in-disguise view on the situation, one could argue that the panic, which is causing businesses to focus on being flexible and shift to accommodate marketplace changes, is actually helping these organizations get back to the core purpose of their strategic plans – to provide direction in uncertain times.

So rather than predict demise for strategic planning as we know it, I’d like to think the recently economic uncertainty has actually infused the process with a renewed sense of life. Let’s reserve the feelings of bereavement for those organizations without a strategic plan, as they’ll quickly discover that without direction, you’re going nowhere – fast.

Driving any highway or back road, you can barely miss a Toyota.  The brand is an automaker’s version of the six degrees of separation.  Wherever you turn, you see one, or you know someone who has one or know someone who knows someone who drives a Toyota.  Quality was the axis of its brand.  I had a Camry a few years ago; loved it and wish I got another after wrapping my front end around the rear of an F-150 (even the best-made car won’t hold up to a monster truck).

Expectations were high when word got out that Toyota had a problem. Surely, a company that built a brand and a massive following of consumers into the world-leading automaker would do the right thing: Aggressively address the issue head-on, right its wrong, profess mea culpa and produce a solution.

And that’s precisely what Toyota did this week.  Problem is, Toyota’s crisis began to unfold last fall, and when the automaker unfurled its media-mix campaign this week, including plopping U.S. honcho Jim Lentz in network studios, critics attacked – and rightly so.

Toyota succumbed to the growing media and governmental pressure too late.  The automaker, and this isn’t backseat driving, knew well enough and long ago it had a problem that would only get worse.  Instead of being proactive, Toyota chose to stick its head in the sand.  That right there can tarnish any brand.

The very premise of issue and crisis management is prevention – not just stopping the headlines or social media storm, but anticipating internal and external threats or vulnerabilities and shoring up those gaps at the operational level.  It’s spending painstaking hours in the C-level suite agonizing over what gives the CEO insomnia and working with the senior management team on systems and protocols, and collaborating with industry, academia, vendors, suppliers and any other party in the supply chain.  It’s putting procedures in place to minimize the likelihood of disruption in business.

The automaker had to have had a crisis plan in someone’s filing cabinet.  Instead, millions of Toyotas are sitting idle in sales lots; even more consumers are now questioning the company’s mettle.

The first two substantial Twitter updates of the year – the Local Trends feature and updated Suggested Users List – may help make your experience on Twitter a little more personal.  Let’s take a look…

The new Local Trends feature allows you to see what conversational trends are popular near you.  As of last week, however, there are currently 15 cities available for users to select.  Dallas, Houston, San Antonio… Three cities from Texas, but no San Diego?  I’m sure America’s Finest City will be one of the next cities added – they can’t ignore our TwitPower for long – but in the meantime, let’s move on to Twitter’s other big change.

Two weeks ago, the Suggested Users List on Twitter was overhauled to recommend tweeters based on categories of interest, instead of just their perceived popularity.  This is a departure from just having a standard list of people users are encouraged to follow, most of whom are talkative celebrities.  Those lucky few celebrities and others on the list got to appear on every new users screen, and most saw astronomical jumps in the number of users subscribing to their tweets (The Guardian went from having 4,000 followers to 66,000 followers in the one month after being put on the list, according to Twitter Counter.)  Needless to say, folks like Scobleizer and myself were surprised we were not on the list, and began to have feelings of jealousy, anger and self-loathing.  After all, Twitter was giving those tweeters an unfair advantage – free advertising – while we were working hard to build a solid base of followers.

For the most part, that’s changed now, although the feature still has room for improvement.  When I looked through the music category, for instance, I still saw an assortment of artists whom I have no interest in following.  Perhaps my eclectic taste in music messed with Twitter’s complex algorithms.  Perhaps I don’t follow enough people.  Either way, the change does make things more organized, which is good news – especially for new users.  Maybe coupling the two new features together, once they’re launched to everyone, will give me local artists, politicians and sports stars I’ll be interested in following.

For marketers, knowing where people are and what they’re interested in can be very helpful, so do these changes signify Twitter getting more marketing-friendly?  I’d say it’s two small steps for the Twitterverse, not a giant leap.

The annual Edelman Trust Barometer shows modest gains among three-quarters of the industries monitored, and findings point to these institutions doing the right thing and a level of increased transparency amidst a perilous global economy.  What’s more interesting, however, is an expectation that governments and companies will revert back to old habits.  That only tells us these gains are fragile and there’s a likelihood for future Barometer reports to highlight declining trust and expectations.

What better time is there to further build relationships and credibility than when trust is climbing?  Smart institutions will invest emotionally and intellectually by working with their stakeholders in identifying what stakes in the ground their trust is rooted in, tap into those beliefs and build upon them.  Doing so, these institutions could emerge from this recession not only stronger, but also with a competitive advantage – stakeholders in their camps.

The report also lays out a suggested path in building trust – a mosaic.  In short, it’s actively involving and engaging a network of stakeholders, including NGOs, to affect change within your organization and industry.  The concept isn’t so new.  Conceptually, it’s much like the coalition building model many of us toy with, yet primarily in issue and crisis management situations.  What the report is suggesting, and it makes perfect sense, is deploying this model as an everyday, long-term business principal, not for short-term objectives and means.

The report also seems to paint a picture of traditional media being left out of the loop in this mosaic.  Traditional media, unsurprisingly, continues to witness declines in trust, giving organizations more reason to question traditional media’s necessity.  Smart traditional media companies, however, would be wise to heed to the report’s call to get closer to stakeholders.  Even smarter ones will make drastic changes in their business model – and that’s not figuring whether a paywall for online content makes sense.  It’s about delivering upon expectations.  Right now, according to the report, that isn’t much.

At NST, we’ve been at the forefront of Web development and design for many years. In fact, we often joke that we’ve been doing “social media” before the term even existed with the development of e-communities like the WD-40 Fan Club and Chicken of the Sea’s Mermaid Club. But we — like many companies worldwide — are now faced with the reality that what we built even a few years ago just will no longer cut it. We’re having to educate our clients on the fact that the Web is constantly evolving. You can’t build a Web site, then walk away and ignore it. While the tools we used in the past were appropriate for the time, they no longer work in today’s environment. “The site is not built in a Web 2.0” format is something that we’ve found ourselves saying often. But what exactly does “Web 2.0” mean?

Last week’s WOM-COMM class touched on this briefly, sparking the writing of this post. Joel Warady, principal at Joel Warady Group, gave the following outline:

Web 1.0
•    Static Web sites
•    One-way communication
•    Corporate voice
Web 2.0 (Social)
•    Interactive
•    Two-way dialogue
•    Everyone is talking
•    Collaborative
Web 3.0
•    Real time information quicker
•    Semantic computing – computers thinking and making decisions with each other

If you are like me the thought of computers “thinking,” as Warady described is somewhat frightening. There are many views of what Web 3.0 might look like, and — believe it or not — Web 3.0 has been talked about as early as 2001 when a story appeared in Scientific American that described a world in which software “agents” perform Web-based tasks typically left to humans. Some envision it as a place where machines can read Web pages much like people. “Intelligent applications” and “machine-based learning and reasoning” are some of the terms people use to discuss a Web 3.0 world. While Web 3.0 is coming, we are finding many Web sites are still struggling to keep up with Web 2.0.

Like Web 3.0, the definition of Web 2.0 is also varied, however, the term Web 2.0 generally refers to almost any site, service or technology that promotes sharing or collaboration. Here are some questions to get you thinking about whether or not your site fits with current Web 2.0 platforms (NOTE: I’m not a developer – so here are some questions for the layperson. Our Interactive Department can speak more to the technologies):

1. Is it dynamic, i.e. does your home page change often? Content management systems make it easier than ever to change content often, without the help of a developer.
2. Is it two-way, allowing your audience to talk to you (or each other), not just the other way around? Features that allow comments, ratings or reviews are ways to allow for two-way communication and interactivity.
3. Is it social/shareable? Can the information on your site be easily shared on other social networks or by RSS feed?
4. Is it easily searchable by keyword?
5. Does it incorporate user-generated content?
6. Does your site make use of video and audio?
7. Is your site properly optimized for your keywords?
8. Are you tracking trend topics and sentiment data on your site to determine what areas are most used/most popular? Are you using this data?
9. Are you giving people something to talk about, i.e. things that encourage conversations, things to share, events, contests, etc.
10. Are you driving traffic to your site through outreach to influentials? Do you know who is influential to your brand online?

Web 3.0 is coming. Web 2.0 is here, and we can’t stress enough the importance of remaining relevant in the ever-changing Web world. NST recommends a regular audit of your site to make sure you don’t get left behind.

WOM-COMM is a certificate program by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association.