What Do Harper and Toyota Have in Common?

No, I'm not here to bash Prime Minister Harper or Toyota by associating them. We can save those debates for another day. What I'm really here to do is highlight an growing trend in PR and that is use of social media and video streaming to conduct interviews online. In both cases, these interviews followed critical events; a YouTube interview was given following the PM's throne speech and a Digg interview was given following the announcement of the Toyota recall. This multi-use of different tools is a mash-up of sorts--something I've talked about in the previous post).

In both interviews, the questions are not generated by the interviewer but by viewers. For the YouTube interview with the Prime Minister a Google page was opened before the opening of the interview to allow for users to submit questions of which the most popular ones are posed by the interviewer. Likewise, in the Digg interview the questions with the most diggs were used. In both cases, crowdsourcing was used to generate questions-crowdsourcing being the outsourcing of ideas or work to a community. An novel approach, it has strong appeal in allowing the public to ask the questions they most want answered. On the downside, some of the more critical, insightful questions from experienced interviewers are not asked and the some of the crowdsources questions can be downright banal. For example, the first question posed to Jim Lentz of Toyota was "What do you drive?" Honestly, that's the question everyone wants to hear yet reveals absolutely nothing about the current and future situation with Toyota massive recalls. This possibly highlights a potential weakness of crowdsourcing; sometimes people don't know what questions to ask or what suggestions to give because the majority aren't experts in the industry.

Overall, as a PR tactic tapping into both social media and live video feeds are a potent tool to use in addressing the issues your audiences find relevant. I don't think we'll be seeing Tiger Woods giving any YouTube interviews anytime soon, but for other public figures like President Obama they could find these tools useful for addressing the public's concerns.

YouTube Interview With Prime Minister Harper


Digg Interview With the COO of Toyota, USA