Lessons to be Learned from the Dominos Social Media Fiasco
The Twittersphere was all a Twitter the past couple of days with tweets about the video on YouTube featuring two (nowfired) employees. The employees posted a video of some back room fast food joint shenanigans; The NY Times has a great piece on how it affected Dominos brand. This situation got me to thinking about how brands need to monitor social media for mentions of their brands and act proactively. the best example I know of right now is what I call the “Comcast model”.
Comcast has employees who monitor Twitter for brand mentions then step up to the plate and proactively provide customer service. If it is a complaint about late service calls they steer the person to the right person in Comcast again via Twitter. This idea is revolutionary in Customer Care.
This Dominos incident could be what gets major brands to wake up to Twitter’s role in social media AND social media in general. Major brands now have to be vigilant and monitor social media to discover what the public is saying about their company. Major brands dealing with the public will benefit from social media monitoring. Corporations monitor other forms of media. the message from the community is pretty loud and clear social media is now a powerful media.
Today, a brand has to be where the customer is. Not to push THEIR message, but be there to listen to the customer and engage with the customer. By getting into the conversation at the crucial beginning potentially problematic customer service complaints can be handled. Or in teh case of Domino’s any sort of negative comment about the company. A small fire is easier to contain than a larger one.
Could Domino’s have benefited from a more proactive approach? Here is what they did, from the NY Times article.
. . . executives decided not to respond aggressively, hoping the controversy would quiet down. “What we missed was the perpetual mushroom effect of viral sensations,” he said.
In social media, “if you think it’s not going to spread, that’s when it gets bigger,” said Scott Hoffman, the chief marketing officer of the social-media marketing firm Lotame. “We realized that when many of the comments and questions in Twitter were, ‘What is Domino’s doing about it’ ” Mr. McIntyre said. “Well, we were doing and saying things, but they weren’t being covered in Twitter.”
By Wednesday afternoon, Domino’s had created a Twitter account, @dpzinfo, to address the comments, and it had presented its chief executive in a video on YouTube by evening.
Social media can’t be ignored.
Corporations can’t ignore Twitter, because Twitter is just one part of social media. Corporations need to monitor blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other engaging platforms. If Domino’s was already on Twitter and monitoring the conversations using Twitter they would have known earlier in the week before the buzz really started. They could have stepped in, and told the Twitter community the “doing and saying things” they were communicating through other channels.
Companies who already have image problems for shoddy service or products would definitely benefit from being proactive. Let’s look at Rogers on Twitter for example. I did a search for Rogers sucks on Twitter and came up with 6 pages of Rogers sucks going back 29 days. Works out to be 96 tweets containing “Rogers Sucks“. Those are customer service complaints Rogers could have nipped in the bud and maybe turned the customers around.
The lesson here? Proactive engaging customer service using social media monitoring is an important way for corporations to deal with social media.
If your company would like to learn more about how they can benefit from social media monitoring feel free to contact me.
