It reveals how an enormously wealthy corporation flexes its muscle when it cannot completely make a problem go away by spreading wealth around Washington. Safety issues with Toyota cars is nothing new. The problems has been going on for years but it has mostly been kept quiet … until now.

When other car companies discover a problem with a particular model, they work through government channels and a recall is issued. When Toyota has a problem, the company spends millions of dollars with Washington lobbying firms that quietly spread the wealth around Capital Hill and government agencies … and the problem has often gone away, the American driving public be damned. Toyota’s strategy is not about reassuring the public; it’s about spending money to make a problem go away.

With Toyota, their strategy reveals that it is not about listening to their customers or engaging with customers, and really, it’s not about safety.

So, now, Toyota is going around the country in a form of corporate witch hunt to discredit drivers who have encountered safety issues with Toyota cars. And, woe be the reporter who writes a word to question what the company is doing. Not very reassuring for the American driving public, in my book.

Here’s the signal Toyota is sending – if you have a problem with one of their cars, it’s your fault. Buyer beware.

Screen shot from Toyota "commitment" TV commercial

All of the problems, the issues, the crisis, the severe damage to brand reputation currently facing Toyota are self-inflicted by the company. And, there are revelations each day that Toyota has been aware of safety issues for not days or months but rather years … and did little or nothing about it.

Today, nearly every model of vehicle made by Toyota worldwide is impacted by safety problems, including brakes and accelerators.

Judy Woodruff reported on PBS NewsHour last evening:

State Farm Insurance said today it reported concerns about acceleration problems in Toyotas in 2007 to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA.

But a Democratic congressional staff memo said neither Toyota nor federal regulators have identified all of the causes of the uncontrolled accelerations.

One wonders whether Toyota simply turned to its Washington lobbyist to sweep the issue under the carpet, as is often the custom in this city. I don’t know but I suspect so.

It was announced in PR Newser just today that Toyota is adding more lobbying firms to its Washington roster, not necessarily an assuring signal from a company that it is actively making cars safer for drivers. Rather, it suggests a company seeking to buy even more influence in the nation’s capital, a city where influence is bought and sold. Washington lobbying firms lack the skills, competence and credentials to manage any crisis of this scale (or any crisis, for that matter, because it’s not what they do.)

In the critical area of brand crisis management, Toyota is fumbling badly. Toyota’s PR in the U.S. is reportedly being handled by Robinson Lerer Montgomery, a rather old-school PR agency that’s not known for being too digitally savvy.

Toyota today faces a crippling crisis of brand trust and reputation over whether its vehicles are safe. A company that built its brand on safety (as did Volvo) is now perceived by many consumers as not a safe brand.

Toyota’s so-called “commitment” television commercial (below) that debuted this week not only seems like disingenuous vanilla coating but is simply not fully truthful. The commercial begins with a grammatical error in the first line – “For over 50 years …” It should have been, “For more than 50 years …” to be grammatically correct. But the commercial states that Toyota has stopped all production to address safety issues for customers, which we find is not the case. The car company reportedly is in chaos over how to address its multiple safety related problems.

Toyota’s “commitment” TV commercial, created in what I’d call a Hallmark Card-style (with apologies to Hallmark), features an overly sentimental-sounding announcer with gentle New Age tinkling piano background, which reminds those in Washington of similar radio spots by Lockheed Martin to lobby for military arms and fighter jets. It’s an old-fashioned style that misses the mark to work for Toyota in order to rebuild trust. The TV commercial is another self-inflicted wound to its brand.

The face and voice of Toyota must stop hiding behind TV commercials and prepared statements. It must authentically and credibly get before the people of America through mainstream media and online.

As Judy Woodruff noted during the NewsHour segment on Toyota’s perils, “Toyota declined our request for an interview.” (The car company is a NewsHour underwriter.)

CTS is an example of a big company, singularly focused on profits, that had better get heavy duty and competent crisis communications counsel … soon.

Does CTS Corp – traded (for now) on the New York Stock Exchange as “CTS,” as they tout at the start of perhaps the dumbest corporate news release in history – accept any sliver of responsibility for a safety issue that has put millions of drivers at peril? Of course not:

“We have no knowledge of any accidents or injuries that have resulted from this rare potential condition.”

Clearly, CTS doesn’t share Toyota’s concern over safety because profits come first. Just check out promotion of all the financials on the CTS home page. It’s all financial hype.

The barely literate CTS news release goes on to make an astonishingly arrogant and dumb statement:

Toyota is a small, but important, customer of CTS, representing approximately 3% of our annual sales. CTS has been actively working with Toyota for awhile (sic) to develop a new pedal to meet tougher specifications from Toyota.

CTS Corp Web Site

To refer to Toyota – the world’s largest auto maker – and use the word, small, in the same sentence reveals an utterly clueless corporate leadership. If, indeed, only 3 percent of CTS business comes from Toyota, why then did CTS stock drop nearly 10 percent yesterday and is in a free fall?

Following the 269 word CTS news release are 465 words of “safe harbor” boilerplate that essentially says nothing CTS has stated in the 269 words is the truth. Safe harbor boilerplate is used by a dwindling number of chief financial officers and attorneys living under the illusion that it creates a shield against law suits. In other words, they believe they can lie and get away with it in news releases.

Law suits?! My guess is that CTS Corp’s CFO Donna L. Belusar, who signed her name to the release and makes $622,000 a year, ain’t seen nothing yet.

Wait until she and CEO Vinod Khilnani get before Henry Waxman’s House Energy and Commerce Committee on Capitol Hill.

CTS Corp’s amateurish and reckless attempts at corporate communications are actually endangering the economic viability of the company and its shareholder value. It needs to be saved from itself.

1. Pull down the shades, turn out the lights, say nothing, pretend it will go away, and discuss changing the name of the company.
2. Have a spokesperson or, even worse, lawyer read a prepared statement admitting no guilt or involvement, passing the blame and pledging to cooperate with unspecified authorities to the fullest extent while really having no intention to do so.
3. Have the CEO stand up in front of a battery of microphones, and blame the press for intruding on the crisis situation, a behavior usually reserved for CEOs of mining companies during underground disasters.

Things haven’t changed much over the years, by the way, for many organizations that have problems. Such conduct sends a message that an organization has not bothered to invest in advance crisis preparedness, is not interested in openness or transparency, and suggests guilt because we have all seen it too often before.

Times have changed. Even though we still occasionally see defensiveness by an organization with a problem, it has become not only ineffective but counter-productive and possibly injurious to an organization’s image and brand reputation.

We are all living in a new era of openness, timeliness, responsiveness and … truthfulness. We want to see a leader in front of the cameras, expressing genuine sincerity and compassion. We want to hear them talking to us even if they don’t know the full story but are doing everything possible to make things right, and will keep us updated. And we expect a tone of compassion in their voices that we believe.

While the need is always there for an organization to put together a common sense plan for the eventuality of a crisis, Web 2.0 has changed crisis response in the world of public relations from “announcements” or talking at audiences to “conversations” and listening.

Forget the old days of Mike Wallace kicking in the door with his camera crew behind him. That never really happened, anyway, even though it has become folklore in the corporate world where many CEOs still fear and detest the media, often for reasons of lack of credibility that they personally created.

Today, an organization is more likely to get scalded and damaged by bloggers and adverse buzz on social media sites and far more quickly than by what’s left of the traditional, mainstream news media. Many newspapers are operating on half the staff they had a year ago. Network and cable television news are utilizing interns to cut costs. So when a crisis happens, chances are a mainstream news reporter will hear about it first from a blogger or an online social media site, like Twitter.

The new mandate in crisis communications is openness, transparency, timeliness and engaging stakeholders, customers, employees, the media, and, especially, bloggers and the online media who cover an industry, in an open conversation. There is not longer such a thing as a “secret.” At the same time, a “no comment” may drive a dagger through the heart of an organization’s reputation.

Forget the old days of Mike Wallace kicking in the door with his camera crew behind him. That never really happened, anyway, even though it has become folklore in the corporate world where many CEOs fear and detest the media.

Today, an organization is more likely to get scalded and damaged by bloggers and adverse buzz on social media sites more quickly than by what’s left of the traditional, mainstream news media. In fact, chances are a mainstream news reporter may hear about a crisis situation first from a blogger … or someone on Twitter.

Today, it’s all about openness, transparency, timeliness and engaging stakeholders, the media, and, especially, bloggers who cover an industry, in an open conversation. There is not longer such a thing as a “secret.”

In planning crisis management, leaders of organizations need to know that they will be judged by how quickly they personally reach out to engage in a conversation with key audiences than hiding behind statements by a spokesperson or a lawyer. They also need to recognize how influential and powerful a communications resource the Internet has become.

The financial damage came fast, and the fallout has cut deep … the private liberal arts college watched its endowment plummet and its fund-raising drop off sharply, as many of the school’s most reliable and deep-pocketed donors suffered heavy losses in the Bernard Madoff investment scandal.

The combination delivered a heavy blow that culminated in [the] stunning announcement that Brandeis would close its renowned Rose Art Museum and sell off the 6,000-piece collection. More radical steps are on the table: eliminating staff and faculty positions, expanding enrollment to boost tuition revenue, and overhauling the entire undergraduate curriculum to cut costs and attract prospective applicants.

The scope and speed of the turmoil buffeting the Waltham campus have left many students and faculty members reeling, with many questioning the administration’s decisions to deal with the financial crisis.

That last paragraph caught my attention – “the scope and speed of the turmoil.” I don’t know anyone who has not been stunned by the depth of the current economic crisis, fed by massive corruption and greed on Wall Street. I’m not surprised – as someone who consults on strategic communications issues in the not-for-profit, academic and corporate fields – about Brandeis getting caught unprepared in the area of crisis communications. I predict we will hear of many such crises on campuses across America. No university is immune.

What exacerbates bad news, such as that from Brandeis, is that the media landscape has changed. We get our news online, for the most part, and news today spreads around the world in a nanosecond. The way to control a crisis is being prepared, in advance, not after the fact.

Crisis communications preparedness rather than crisis communications management. The former is what all universities should be focusing on today because it will help to protect a university’s reputation tomorrow when and if bad news strikes.

Last evening, there were so many visitors to this blog to read How Not to be a Key Online Influencer – approximately 118,000 at one time – that my VPS hosting service crashed for a short time. Reading the comments from visitors, I saw a recurring appreciation for hearing both sides of an online story. I viewed it as bringing journalism to blogging, and no big deal. By the way, I really appreciate people taking the time to post those comments.

It demonstrates, I believe, the enormous power of Twitter and social media. As Lyelle Petersen (@93octane) commented on this blog, “a perfect example of how dangerous social media can be if not taken seriously.”

First let me explain my personal perspective – I am a trained journalist as well as a veteran media strategist in Washington, D.C. I won an Emmy Award for investigative journalism. Call me old-fashioned, if you wish, but I want to get both sides of a story, even an online story. But, if you feel inclined to call me old-fashioned, consider that I today manage 18 blogs; have actively blogged since 2003; am the publisher of BoomerCafe.com since 1999, the Internet’s most popular online magazine for baby boomers with active lifestyles; run BlogStrategies.net; have just published a new book on communications in Web 2.0 – “The Media Savvy Leader;” have a new, free ebook for download on the subject, “Media Savvy in the Internet Era; and I consult globally with major organizations on how to communicate openly, transparently and effectively in today’s new online world.

I first learned about this story last Friday through an email from the CEO of a major organization. He learned of it from his PR company (not Ketchum). The email clearly was making the rounds. But I viewed it as nothing more than cyber-rumor, and I was not going to write about until hearing the full story. I should note that lack of confirmation didn’t stop New York publicist Peter Shankman from blogging about it last Friday. But, it was unsubstantiated, and just recycling rumor which, I personally believe, will eventually erode and detract from the credibility of blogging.

In the interim, until yesterday, I monitored how the story unfolded but it remained just rumor. So, I did what any reporter would do and picked up the telephone and sent emails. I first called James Andrews (right), the Ketchum PR account person in Atlanta who posted the unfortunate open opinion on Twitter. I left him a detailed voicemail. He has never bothered to return my call, which is incomprehensible behavior by any PR person, in my opinion … but I will get back to Andrews in a minute.

I then emailed Ray Kotcher, CEO of Ketchum (an Omnicom company), but never received a reply. I will return to that in a minute.  Then, I called the FedEx corporate communications department in Memphis and spoke for some time with a person who confirmed the whole story, provided names, details, and followed-up by immediately emailing a statement from FedEx that essentially pointed the finger of blame at Andrews. The only people who acted like professional communicators, in my opinion, were those at FedEx.

After writing the story and waiting a reasonable time, I posted it.

Then, at 5:03 p.m., I had a call from Marv Gellman, director in Ketchum’s technology practice. He said he could provide a statement, and I asked that it be emailed. I received this two-line statement which, like FedEx, pointed the finger of blame at Andrews. It arrived via email at 9:34 p.m.:

It was a lapse in judgment and we’ve apologized to our client. We greatly value this long standing client relationship. It is our privilege to work with them.

Gellman called afterwards to claim he had sent the email at 5:17 but then admitted, twice, that he used the wrong email address. He then wanted me to back-time the mention of it on my blog, but I told him I was not covering up his mistake.

What subsequently developed was enormous awareness and discussion on Twitter that has lasted into today – hundreds of thousands of people are online, discussing. But missing from the Twitter social media discussion have been the alleged social media experts at Ketchum. I personally find that lack of online savvy to be very revealing.

What I note, most glaringly, is the seeming lack of awareness about a possible brewing crisis. Ketchum and FedEx, instead, did the old-PR thing to point the finger of blame at the junior person. It’s not a characteristic of responsible leadership by a big PR firm, in my opinion, to blame staff. I don’t think anyone gets off that easy in today’s online world, of which Ketchum seems to be a novice.

Today, I heard from James Andrews, the Ketchum account person in Atlanta, who started this whole thing with his unfortunate Twitter posting to the world. He didn’t call so I could not interview him. But even he pointed the finger of blame at someone else when he posted:

My friend didn’t get your message although I’m locked away in a new biz pitch 1,000′s of mi away and not very accessible.

His excuse was sort of like, the dog ate my homework, even though the switchboard person at Ketchum Atlanta says Andrews checks his voicemail, “all the time.”

I asked him via Twitter direct for a telephone interview but he declined, referring me instead to his blog, TheKeyInfluencer.com.

I explained, that his blog was merely one-sided, and did not afford an interview. I then asked these questions, which all seemed reasonable:

• How long has he been in PR? With Ketchum?
• What social media, Web 2.0 training did he have?
• What was his major in college?
• How old was he?
• Has he ever worked in a newsroom?
• I explained these were legitimate questions, and asked why didn’t he want to be interviewed?
• Had he been told by Ketchum not to give interviews?

Andrews responded, “David I have a job to do and last week posted a response that I have moved on. I’m not sure what you are looking for.”

I asked him what part of those questions he didn’t understand.

Andrews responded, “WSJ-2000, and I too am an online journalist. Please allow me my space.”

That was the end of the Twitter direct exchange. I am not sure what “WSJ-2000″ means. Of course, an interview with Andrews by phone would have permited me to ask but that was not to be. A Google search suggests that some online work done by Andrews may have been reported by the Wall Street Journal some years ago but there is nothing to suggest that he worked for the Journal or any other media.

Early today, I also emailed Gellman, the technology practice director, with a list of questions:

• When was it (the tech practice) formed?
• What is the level of expertise in blogging, Web 2.0 (I know that is a broad question) and social media?
• What sort of training programs do you have for members of the Technology Practice?
• What is your background in social media, other than telling me you once worked for a small radio station?
• How long have you been director of the Technology Practice?
• Have you ever started a blog, and if so, what time and is it still online?
• Why didn’t Mr. Andrews, whom I assume is a member of your team, not return my telephone call yesterday?

After now seven hours, I have not heard from Gellman so I can only assume his agency has no plausible answers.

The scenario all this paints is how badly big PR is comprehending today’s interactive Web 2.0 world of openness, transparency and accuracy. It also demonstrates an astonishing level of hubris and/or lack of knowledge for how the media, Web 2.0 or otherwise, works, in my opinion. Ketchum clearly doesn’t get it, and I wonder how they manage media for their clients.

Big PR is locked in its decades-old bad habits of pushing stuff on behalf of clients out the door – pushing press releases, pushing one-sided promotion, pushing press kits. In other places, that would be called, propaganda. All one-sided push. Pushing stuff is what Andrews has been doing with his blog. That’s not where today’s world is.

Whatever it is labeled, it is the antithesis of communications in today’s interactive Web 2.0 world, and it is the opposite of journalism. Reporters … legitimate and trained journalists … need interviews, and a chance to write both sides, and that goes for blogging journalists, too, because blogging is the New Media. Clearly, that’s not where Ketchum PR is in today’s online world.  Incidentally, Ketchum is the agency responsible for producing several fake video news releases a few years ago that were nothing more than promotion of an education-related political agenda by the Bush White House at taxpayer expense that caused a scandal.

While researching “The Media Savvy Leader,” I found a trend developing among companies and organizations, large and small – in order to achieve a more effective footprint of awareness in the fast-evolving world of Web 2.0, companies are either hiring enhanced expertise in-house and/or hiring consultants who authentically have the credentials to help. Big PR is stumbling badly or fading online. With big PR generally stalled in past days of glory, such a trend may have a profound impact on the future of the public relations industry.

I call it the changing face of PR leadership.

Lastly, let me mention FedEx, the company that permitted the whole image crisis to happen by not having guidelines in place to restrict employees for writing messages to external audiences that appear to be on behalf of the company. FedEx dropped the ball on one of the rules of communications 101.