I’ve always thought Toyota was a great brand. I’ve had two Toyotas, both used little guys that seemed to last forever…just add a little oil. Now Toyota’s hit the skids a bit, and though I switched to biodiesel-ready Mercedes almost a decade ago, it’s still a brand I believe in. They sense there are a lot more people like me out there, and have launched an interesting crowdsourced story platform on Facebook, the type of which we’re going to see A LOT more of. The campaign is called “Auto-Biography” and features something I call storysourcing, which combines written stories, videoed stories, and in the future, animation.

People love to tell  stories about things they love. Storysourcing is the method of leveraging that that passion through audience-created written, photographed, or videoed stories of experiences that clearly support an an organization’s brand.

Nobody can tell those stories better than your audience. No agency, no famous commercial director. Toyota (and Saatchi, who created the campaign) has found a good structure here; since July 2, they’ve supposedly collected 5,400 stories on Facebook. It shows Toyota’s belief in the power of story, the power of social media and the power of their audience’s voice. It’s a good number considering they’re not even giving out prizes. Really small barrier to story entry: just choose your car and type in your little story, and maybe they’ll show up with a camera and film you. Very smart.

The campaign does the following:

• strengthens Toyota’s audience engagement
• heightens (and helps repair) their brand authenticity
• gives Toyota serious fodder to expand their social media presence

The content is a wide variety of compelling, highly targeted and inspiring stories to be posted and reposted with a dash of branding, and evoking a high level of audience trust. I saw one cool video called the “Boller Camry Tree” about a family that have been driving Toyota for years. The 14 year old kid is hoping to get the Camry hybrid for college; the mom doubts it.

Toyota is culling a small selection of the best stories to market more widely, has used eight of them in commercials…and supposedly they’re going to animate them. I’m looking forward to seeing this.

Compare Toyota’s campaign to Thermos’ recent ‘story’ project. Looks like actors telling stories that aren’t really stories, and aren’t really interesting…too bad.

Toyota shows once again that they get it.

Tags: brand, crowdsourcing, facebook, social media, storytelling, toyota

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 11th, 2010 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Stories Well Told, Storytelling as Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.