When professionals think about social media – usually the first thing that comes up is either Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. While these sites are still important for public relations professionals to consider in their practice and research, it is equally important to look at the new trends in technology and other emerging social media platforms.
One of these emerging platforms in social media would have to be social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking sites allow individuals (and in some cases corporations) post, share, and comment on various news articles, blog posts, video links are shared with the online community.
A recent case that has been getting a lot of discussion in the public relations arena has been Toyota and how they have been dealing with their recent recall crisis. Toyota has been very active with getting information out to their stakeholders with social media, and they have recently been in the news for using Digg to do this. What the Japanese motor company did with Digg was interesting and unique – they had the USA president Jim Lentz participate in the Digg Dialog interview series. The overall goal of this move towards participating with Digg is to create more awareness of the brand and have more conversation and dialogue with Toyota’s online community. Toyota made the following statement regarding this interview:
“Toyota is one of the most admired and recognizable brands in the world. With this recall, Toyota is facing intense scrutiny around how they will manage and get past the crisis. With social media channels such as Digg emerging as primary sources for news and engagement, Toyota is taking the unprecedented step of putting its senior executive in a direct dialogue with consumers, using social media to address Toyota’s response to this extraordinary challenge.”
This is very interesting. I do have to agree that Digg among other social bookmarking sites are definitely emerging as a top resource for news and engagement with key stakeholders. This is similar to what we found when we were looking at the CDC and the H1N1 case on Delicious. We found that people were actively sharing and commenting on various articles, YouTube videos, Tweets, and blog posts on the issue from a centralized location. It was a really interesting study to work on (along with Dr. Michael Palenchar and Dr. Shari Veil). We will be presenting our paper on social bookmarking and the case of the H1N1 crisis and CDC at the NCA Conference later this year. Very exciting!
Hope you all are having a great day!
Best Wishes,
Karen
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