Last week Dominos Pizza got a heavy education in the power of Social Media.
Then not satisfied with that prank, they uploaded the video to YouTube where over 1,000,000 hits were accumulated before the video was taken off by YouTube.
The 2 employees were fired and arrested on criminal warrants.
Immediately Domino’s set out to contain the damage. They did not have a Social Media presence before this incident, but have since used YouTube and Twitter (@dpzinfo) to talk to their customers about the situation.
Damage has been done to the dominos brand and Dominos is doing what it can.
Has Dominos already had a Social Media prescence and a following, might they have been more successful in defending their reputation?
At the very least they probably would have known earlier than they did.
Patrick Doyle, President of Dominos has done an extraordinarily good job of using Social Media to communicate with his customers.
1)He laid out the facts
2) He stated the employees had been fired.
3) He stated they closed the store and sanantized it.
4) He stated that they were getting criminal warrants for their arrest.
5) He communicated how seriously they took this and their reputation.
But had they been monitoring their brand 24/7, the damage would not have been as severe. There are many ways in which to track your brand.
But companies need to have a social media crisis plan in place. Not just traditional media.
Thats what hurt Dominos is the fact that the news broke in the social media sphere and instead of addressing it where it started, Dominos went to the traditional media, only getting to social media much later.