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.

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)

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 …

The study’s authors readily point out that the data was collected over the course of 2009 and doesn’t reflect Toyota’s current dilemma as it unfurled at the beginning of this year.  The authors also note the automaker could learn from Tylenol, which in 1982 recalled 31 million bottles of pills after seven people were killed in the tampering scare.  That brand, which was forced to recall children’s liquid medicine last year, sits at no. 6 in the study.

Tylenol maker Johnson & Johnson has a history of effectively managing crisis situations, though the FDA earlier this year ridiculed the company for being slow to respond in its most recent crisis.  What this goes to show you, however, is a history of doing the right thing and acting aggressively in a crisis situation can maintain and build trust among stakeholders, consumers in particular.  Trust is fragile, and how you respond in a crisis situation can build and maintain trust, the authors state.

Toyota started off this week with public apologies before Congress.  How it fixes its problems, communicates with stakeholders and develops systems to prevent further lapses will determine if the automaker regains or builds trust, and where it will stand in next year’s report.

Some deplorable U.S. hunger statistics were published a couple of weeks ago in the Institute of Food Technologists newsletter.  A study from Feeding America, the nation’s largest domestic hunger relief group, reports more than 37 million people – one in eight Americans – receive emergency food annually. This is an increase of 46% over a 2006 study. Hunger in America 2010 is the first research study to capture the significant connection between the recent economic downturn and an increased need for emergency food assistance.

Couple this with estimates that the world will need 100% more food than currently produced to feed increases in world population by year 2050 and you see a daunting challenge in need of new and innovative solutions. The need to merge feeding objectives with increased productivity, poverty reduction and sustainability is surfacing in multiple professional forums around the world.  It’s a movement long overdue.

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

Setting up a social media strategy involves many components, including listening to the social media dialogue, determining the best platforms for your company or organization based on your particular audience (NOTE: Facebook and Twitter aren’t for every company), thinking through your online voice to ensure it is consistent with your brand, setting benchmarks and determining how you will measure success, among other factors.

While all these steps are important, a recent WOM-COMM course led by Blake Cahill at Visible Technologies underscored an important component of developing a social media strategy that people often overlook — drawing your virtual line in the sand as to what you will and will not do in social media prior to engaging. Cahill talked about defining “actionable content” and “blacklisted content.” In other words, what topics in social media will you respond to and which ones will you let be?

Like all social media efforts, nothing is set in stone, and there is no cookie cutter approach; however doing some of this upfront thinking will save your team time and energy in the long run. Here are three simple steps to help you get started:

1. Ask yourself, “what are some of the most common issues we encounter as a company?” (reminder: listening to the online dialogue will help you answer this).
2. Then, think through how you will respond, making sure those responses are consistent with how other areas of your company may respond to a similar issue, i.e. if a customer complains on Twitter, your response should be consistent with that which would be given if a consumer were to dial a 1-800 customer service number, or send an e-mail complaint to your company via the Web.
3. Put this all together – along with your key messages – into a social media response guide, which can be used by anyone communicating on behalf of your company. This should outline what you will and will not respond to along with common or sample responses (NOTE: I can’t emphasize enough that this should be a guide, not a document to merely cut and paste from).

Cahill gave the following examples of “actionable content” and “blacklisted content.”

Actionable Content
•    Posts with positive, neutral or mixed sentiment
•    Posts written within the past 5 days, or that still have active comments
•    Posts where users are asking questions or requesting more information
•    Posts that contain inaccurate information about your brand
Blacklisted Content
•    Posts that are flaming, raging, or use excessive profanity
•    Posts that are older than 5 days, or no longer have active comments
•    Posts on sites “X,” “Y,” and “Z,” which prohibit corporate participation
•    Pricing discussions

If you are considering entering the social media space, it’s important to walk through this process. At NST, we’ve seen it be extremely successful.

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

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.

Yours truly sans suit, The Donald and my client, John Sawyer

So, more than a year ago, we sat in the lobby of the W hotel in Manhattan, surrounded by lawyers and producers for the 2009 season of Celebrity Apprentice.  Less than 72 hours prior, they had recruited Chicken of the Sea to be on the show – for that matter, a two-hour episode directly leading up to the finale.

A number of ideas swirled about with regard to what the marketing challenge would be and how to tie the brand and its products in the show.  For the record, the lawyers and producers were some of the coolest folks.  They had their minds set on some ideas, but fortunately open and respectful that we (all two of us – yours truly and my client – out-numbered 3 to 1) were passionate about the brand and the story it had to tell.

For two years leading up to that fateful call from Celebrity Apprentice, Chicken of the Sea had been engaging consumers in conversations about health, nutrition and convenience through online and offline mediums.  We learned there is a powerful story to tell not just about the brand and its products, but also in how consumers view and use Chicken of the Sea – what it means to them.  We saw an opportunity to replicate that with the likes of Clint Black, Joan “Cluck Cluck Splash” Rivers et al on Celebrity Apprentice.

With agreement from the lawyers and producers, we laid out a challenge for the celebrities to tell the Chicken of the Sea story in the form of a jingle and a 30-second radio spot.  Moreover, it wasn’t as simple as that.  The celebs and their respective teams needed to invest the time in learning about Chicken of the Sea and its loyal consumers.  They weren’t going to be judged solely on how catchy their tunes would be, but more on telling the story about the consumers behind the brand.

What that led to, in addition to the drama and debate of creating a jingle and radio spot, is two hours worth of unscripted conversations about Chicken of the Sea – precisely what we were shooting for and attempting to replicate, and there was hardly any discussion about getting video footage of the products in the celebs’ hands or on a table near where they sat.  Sacrilege to some, but again it was about the conversations.

So when The New York Times published the iTVX data on the most effective product placement in television for 2009, most would think the initial reaction of Chicken of the Sea being at the top was met with excitement.  But it told us much more.  Real conversations are powerful, more powerful than arranging to have your product sit statically in front of a celebrity, and product integration must reflect the character of the brand.  Alongside that is being a champion for your client, its brand and what it represents.

I just wish I were smart enough to wear a better suit on the show, and, for what it’s worth, my mother hasn’t forgiven me for contributing to Clint’s firing.