Carlos Ghosn, the President and CEO of Renault and Nissan, held a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) session yesterday, and it’s been labeled as “the biggest PR stunt” users of the site have ever seen.
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It’s still baffling that companies think they can get away with this sort of thing on the internet, but Ghosn and the team at Renault/Nissan behind the AMA appear to have set up the session so that the CEO was met only with positive, easy questions created by day-old accounts. Questions posed to Ghosn (that were among the only ones he answered, as he only provided responses to 20 questions) included “what was your first car?” “Do you have any advice for a new Nissan salesman?” and the embarrassingly sycophantic: “I’m a die hard Datsun/Nissan fan that is very glad to see how well the company has done with you at the helm and hoping to see many more years of continued success. My question is how you see hydrogen fuel cells playing a part in electric vehicles and if Nissan/Renault are investing, or planning to invest, in this technology directly or through partnerships?”
The AMA began to arouse suspicion after it made its way onto Reddit’s front page, with user HiimCaysE doing a little bit of investigative work and discovering that all of the questions answered by Ghosn were posted by new accounts. The post itself also had positive karma, the points awarded to threads upvoted by the Reddit community, in the thousands, while its comments hadn’t generated nearly as much, leading those in the thread to also speculate that the company had been shamelessly upvoting the post using dummy accounts in order for it to reach the front page of the site.
The AMA was held in order to promote Nissan’s foray into self-driving cars, which the company pledge to have on the market by 2020. However, many have reservations about the tech, and this is undoubtedly why Renault/Nissan decided to rig the AMA to ensure that Ghosn didn’t have to confront any tough questions regarding their autonomous cars. Inevitably, Ghosn’s answers and the softball questions posed to him by these day-old accounts were downvoted into oblivion, and in their place now stands criticisms of the company and their self-driving cars, all sitting on the front page of one of the largest sites in the Western world, turning this whole debacle into a PR disaster.
The top comment on the AMA is now from user Matt Barrie, who posted:
Hi Carlos,
At the Stanford Executive Program in July 2011 I asked you whether you had any plans to work on self driving cars and you were fairly dismissive of them. You were also stunned when I said that Nevada had just past laws starting to allow them.
What changed your mind?
Regards,
Matt
Ouch.
Companies should take note: this is how you don’t address your potential consumers. They’re not as blissfully ignorant as you may think.
