GM communication – trust & crisis

GM has long been a shining star in my world out of a communications perspective. They started (in my eyes) a newsroom trend, corporate Flickr trend, and much else. I have used them as an example in dozens of presentations. I have used Starbucks as well – particularly their “Rumor Response” section of the corporate website.

Unfortunately, this response has been quite unresponsive lately. Dead, in another word.

Now I found something else great by GM, and a reason to swap all those Starbucks screen shots for yet another shameless GM plug: the GM “Facts an Fiction” section. What they are doing here is in big bold text disrupting rumors and false statements. One particularly interesting “fact” was that their main brands are actually above average in independent quality indexes. (I “knew”, along with others I’m sure, that GM created cars of inferior quality.)

This section seems to be quite lively, and it is highly to-the-point. Clearly, they are tired of getting the same questions by journalists, and reading the same errors in papers and blogs. Oh, how I wish others could follow.

And I also wish that they would have been just a tad bit braver – they should have listed the false statements as well. In red. A regular corporate communications “Mythbusters”.