If corporate crises were a game, the Toyota safety recall would be a Superbowl contender.

Toyota Motors is a company that heavily promotes its engineering innovation, production quality and service reliability.  In a haymaker blow to Toyota’s reputation, the company suspended production and sales of eight of its most popular models — including America’s (previously) best-selling car, the Camry.  And now Toyota is recalling millions of already-sold cars worldwide to fix a potentially life-threatening problem: unintended acceleration.

(Disclosure: I have a personal stake in this story: I own a second-generation Toyota Prius.)

This week Toyota began shipping parts to dealers across the country to correct an accelerator problem that could lead to cases of disastrous unintended acceleration.  The Toyota problem is so serious the automaker stopped production and sales on eight of its top-selling models — including the Camry, the best-selling car in the U.S.  The scope of the problem is staggering: I’ve seen stories on the web sites of European, Japanese, South African, Canadian and Israeli newspapers.  Toyotas sold in China have also been implicated.

I always judge a company’s handling of a crisis by what I call the Tylenol Standard.  Back in 1982, Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules were the best-selling over-the-counter pain reliever in the United States.  Then, seven people in the Chicago area died; they had all been taking the drug.  J & J jumped into action with an approach that is taught in business schools to this day.  The company suspended all production of Tylenol immediately.  It recalled the 31 million bottles of Tylenol then on store shelves, destroying all the medication that was returned.  It launched a rigorous inspection of all its manufacturing facilities. And, Johnson & Johnson made top officials readily available to the media where their story was: “We don’t know how this happened.  We will find out and correct it.  Meanwhile, do not use any of our products that you have at home; return them immediately, and report any adverse effects from our medication that you have already taken.”

The company’s response was fast, comforting and took a page from the Harry Truman adage: “The buck stops here.”

As it turned out, the buck did not stop at Johnson & Johnson.  The Tylenol deaths were murders, not the result of accidental contamination.  Someone had tampered with some Extra-Strength Tylenol boxes in drug stores around Chicago. The killer opened the packaging and the bottles, inserted potassium cyanide into the capsules and then resealed everything and put the product back on the shelves.  Police and FBI theorized the killer had a specific target in mind but killed others in order to make his intended victim look like a random casualty in a series of accidental poisonings-by-contamination.  (The case remains unsolved to this day, possibly because the intended victim never took the contaminated drug.)

Within a year, Extra-Strength Tylenol had regained its position as the country’s top-selling pain killer.   Unfortunately, the Toyota brass must have cut class in business school the day they taught the 1982 Tylenol lesson.

Toyota was late to the table with an admission that there was, indeed, a problem and slow with information to the media (and through the media to the millions of Toyota owners worldwide).  This sowed the seeds of confusion and resulted in a serious erosion of trust in the company.

Toyota’s worldwide president, Akio Toyoda, grandson of the company’s founder,  made no statements to the media and no apologies to customers until a crew from NHK, the Japanese TV network cornered him at the World Economic Summit in Davos the last week of January.  This reclusive behavior despite the fact that the issue has gained massive media attention since last August when an off-duty California Highway Patrol officer and three family members burned to death after crashing a runaway Lexus they had borrowed from a dealer in San Diego.  The company’s U.S. president, Jim Lentz, was also noticeably absent from the media until February 1, when it was time to announce the fix.  Then he began a media blitz explaining the problem and the repair, a belated attempt to restore Toyota’s battered image.

But wait, there’s more, as the infomercials say.  If you look at the list of cars being recalled for the accelerator fix (below) you’ll notice that the Lexus in which Highway Patrol officer  Mark Saylor died — a 2009 ES — is not on it.  That’s because those cars — and many other Toyota-made cars, including my Prius — were subject to an earlier recall, back in November, 2009.  In that recall, the Lexus accelerator pedals were shortened so they could not be trapped under the floor mat — the ostensible cause of Officer Saylor’s accident. (For the Prius, I was just told to remove the mat — which I had already done.  It still sits in my trunk awaiting the promised “permanent fix.”

But at the same time as the mat matter was being handled, Toyota was aware that for six years both the company and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been looking into multiple cases of unintended acceleration and that the mats were unlikely culprits in all of them.  In its autumn response, Toyota tried to sweep the more basic accelerator problem under the floor mat problem.  In fact, in November, Toyota put out a press release misrepresenting the NHTSA’s conclusions about the floor mats and had to issue another press release correcting the first one.  But neither press release acknowledged that unintended acceleration might have been caused by anything other than misplaced or mismatched floor mats.

So there were two problems and initially Toyota tried to conflate the simpler problem (the mats) with the more serious problem (the accelerator mechanism).  The mat recall affected 3.8 million vehicles and despite the fact that NHTSA told Toyota that mat removal was at best an interim solution, no long-term solutions has been reached for many of those recalled cars.  The faulty accelerator affects 4.6 million vehicles, some of which were previously involved in the mat recall (with the attendant danger that owners who addressed the mat problem will now think the entire problem solved.)

Here is a list of the cars in the current Toyota recall.

• 2009-2010 RAV4

• 2009-2010 Corolla

• 2009-2010 Matrix

• 2005-2010 Avalon

• 2007-2010 Camry

• 2010 Highlander

• 2007-2010 Tundra

• 2008-2010 Sequoia

Don’t think of Tiger Woods as an athlete. Think of him as a business, a brand. Now let’s ask if Tiger Woods, Inc. was well served by its Founder/Chairman/CEO in the ongoing solo car accident scandal.

From the public relations point of view, I think not.

On November 30, Nancy Armour, a reporter for the Associated Press, called to ask me how I thought Woods was handling the incident. It was early on in the chronology of the story; the incident was just a bizarre early-morning single-car accident that may or may not have been caused by an argument over what might or might not have been an extra-marital liaison. At this point only one rather disreputable tabloid had made a single salacious allegation against Woods. Woods had crashed his car, been to the hospital and returned home. He declined to talk with the police or the media, and he issued the first of his series of web site comments (this was the one where there was neither domestic abuse nor extra-marital dalliances).

I told Ms. Armour I thought Woods was handling his PR badly. My comments were shaped by my current job as a media trainer and crisis communications consultant and by my previous experience as executive producer of Good Morning America  and Entertainment Tonight. Woods, I told the AP, would be wise to get out in front of the story, even if he gave only one interview to one reporter. Clamming up opens the floodgates of rumor and speculation. Once the current is running through, it’s nearly  impossible to close those floodgates.

Ms. Armour’s story contrasted Woods’ approach with the way David Letterman handled his scandal. Confronted with an equally salacious scandal wrapped in an extortion attempt, Letterman went on the air and told his audience the story.  “By revealing that himself, Letterman followed the No. 1 rule in crisis communications: Take control of the story,” Ms. Armour wrote.

My point here is not to rehash the growing scandal but to look at it as a teachable moment for any business. Evasion and/or cover-up are almost always worse than the initial problem. And they never work. The more one evades, the deeper the media digs.

Neal Pilson, the former president of CBS sports, was quoted in another AP story as saying, “At some point, he’ll play golf and he’ll move on. And at some point this will become more embarrassing to the media than to Tiger.”

Now it is true that Tiger Woods owes you and me and the rest of the public absolutely nothing more than the best golf game he can deliver and he appears to be the best player of the game since 12th century Scottish shepherds used sticks to knock stones into rabbit holes on the location that today is the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews.

But Woods owes much more to his sponsors, whose largesse has supplied the bulk of his estimated billion dollar fortune. He owes them what they paid for which is unsurpassed talent wrapped in a clean, wholesome image. At the moment, the talent remains, but the image is showing lots of tarnish. Woods owes them the behavior that goes with the image they’re paying for. If these sponsors wanted a “bad boy” the sports, music and movie business offer no end of rogues they could hire.

That said, as of this writing — three of Woods’ sponsors, Nike, Gatorade and Gillette, say they will stand by him. Another sponsor, AT&T, had yet to be heard from; but it remains to be seen just what “standing by” means in this instance. A company can continue to pay Woods and use him far more restrictively than in the past. They can trot him out for corporate events and special appearances and simply not run his TV commercials and magazine ads. Certainly, Nike, which sells a lot of shoes and athletic gear to women, has got to be thinking seriously about how it can use Woods in a way that won’t alienate potential female customers.

And, we will never know about the deals that don’t come his way because a corporation that might have ponied up another fortune for a Tiger Woods endorsement decides not to approach him in the aftermath of the scandal.

Bottom line: you can’t protect your brand behind a wall of silence.

***Update: As the scandal has developed, Woods’ sponsors have moderated their “stand by our man” posture.  Click HERE for the story from the Boston Herald.

Last time we asked whether or not your business needs a crisis communications plan. On the assumption you are reading this post because you answered “yes,” to the question, here are some tips for you and your spokespersons.

Assign your spokesperson or spokespersons in advance: Often, when a crisis breaks, you see multiple personalities jostling for the media spotlight, trying to manage the crisis communications. This is counterproductive; it sends a message that nobody is in charge. Also, it’s imperative that everyone in the organization knows who the proper spokespersons are and refers reporters to those spokespersons. If your people don’t know who to refer the media to, you’ll face a flood tide of speculative answers from your own employees, most of whom will have only a partial picture of the crisis. Also, the fewer the spokespersons and the higher their rank, the better the plan.

Keep your spokespersons in the loop: Your crisis communications plan must include mechanisms for keeping spokespersons in the information flow. They cannot address public concerns if they don’t know what’s going on themselves. Never withhold information from your spokespersons because you want it withheld from the public. If that information gets out and the spokesperson did not know about it, he loses all credibility with the media.

Once you have your spokesperson or spokespersons, here are some tips for how they should communicate in a crisis.

Stay out in front: Late messages are as bad as mixed messages. If your spokespersons don’t get out and address the crisis quickly, other “experts,” many of them self-appointed and ill-informed, will assume the mantle of authority. After the 9/11 attacks, Americans wondered if they should buy gas masks. It took the federal government three weeks to come up with the recommendation not to buy them. During these weeks, self-appointed terrorism experts filled the 24-hour news channels, warning of chemical weapons and frightening the public into depleting Army/Navy stores and online military surplus companies of every gas mask in stock. If you don’t respond in a timely manner, someone else will, and it may prove hard to wrest back control of crisis communications once that horse is out of the barn.

Tone: Your spokespersons needs to exhibit empathy, not paternalism. People resent being talked down to, even in extremely dire crises. Another form of paternalism is withholding bad news from the public for fear it will panic or react badly. Eventually the information is going to come out and once it does, your credibility will be in shambles.  The public can handle bad news if you present it in a mature, factual, respectful way. A series of 55 focus groups conducted across the country by the Centers for Disease Control and five universities found that uncertainty is more difficult to deal with than bad news and that any information is empowering in a crisis.

Speculation: The media will invite you and your spokespersons to speculate on the progress and outcome of the crisis. Decline the invitation.  Speculation is dangerous. If you are wrong, you damage your credibility.

Swat rumors promptly: A rumor left standing becomes a fact in short order. While this is an extreme example and unlikely to be duplicated in the world of business, it is instructive: There were rumors of mass assaults in the Superdome in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It didn’t happen, but authorities failed to refute the rumors in a timely manner and to this day many people still believe and repeat the stories.

Don’t answer what you can’t answer. Do answer what you can answer: “I don’t know. We’re working on it,” is a perfectly valid answer, especially if followed by a description of what steps are being taken. On the other hand, you can’t manage a crisis by withholding information. As Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice, “Truth will out.”  When it does, your credibility plummets and you find yourself managing both a crisis and a credibility gap.  But what about information you really can’t share? Respectfully, tell the media that you are withholding some information and why you are withholding it. If you have no results to report, talk about the process that will lead to results. The public wants to know something is being done, even if it hasn’t yet borne fruit.

The bottom line: candor: Candor is the most important tool for the crisis communicator. It served Johnson & Johnson well in the 1982 Tylenol poisoning crisis. J&J’s handling of the crisis is cited in every crisis management text written in the last three decades. And from a business point of view, candor worked extremely well because within months of the emergency, Tylenol regained its position as the country’s top-selling over-the-counter pain relief medication.