In the kids book “George Saves the World by Lunchtime”, George saves the world through recycling. His four tips are reduce, repair, reuse and recycle. When Toyota decided to build Toyota Conversations Powered by Tweetmeme, they applied the same approach. The collaboration is about more than simply utilizing a social media tool to reach out to customers. It also allows Toyota to meet business objectives like reducing resources, while at the same supporting customer-friendly initiatives such as transparency and engagement.
Reduce
Simply by automating the collection of content, Toyota minimizes the number of people, time and level of effort required to run a highly engaging website. No one is needed to create content, no complicated workflow and approval process – no manual push to live. The content is published for the most part by fans and nay-sayers of Toyota alike. This means Toyota staff can concentrate on curation, conversation and engagement.
Reuse
The entire site, from front to back, is reusing existing resources. The hardware, software and interface design is developed and delivered by Tweetmeme. The platform existed – Toyota is just tweaked existing data to deliver relevant, real-time content to the press, its customers, its employees – and let’s not forget the competition.
Recycle
Instead of building from scratch, Toyota is recycling an existing idea and repurposing it for its own needs. As such, the solution was most likely delivered in a quarter of the time (or less) that it would have taken Toyota to build a similar solution. And even if Toyota tried to create the experience from scratch, it most likely couldn’t replicate the Tweetmeme model as it also gained the brains, years of research and development and data management skills of Tweetmeme.
Management is RELATIVELY happy as the solution is inexpensive, quick to market, and from a development perspective, generally risk free as it is a proven solution that Tweetmeme will continue to evolve. The data geeks are happy because they have a new toy to play with, while the marketing team is thrilled because they have a platform to view real-time what customers are saying, and respond accordingly.
These concepts of reuse, reuse and recycle on the Web
, however Tweetmeme example is a solid case study that demonstrates these concepts well.
