Dear Tom, Smart Marketers 1 Dominos 0

I had so many titles for this blog post, “Will You Be Late to the Party?”, “Accident Waiting To Happen”, “Being the Number One Viral Marketing Video Does Not Equal Success”, “How Much Worse Can It Be For Dominos? Employees Contaminating Food and one was a Sex Offender” . But I had to choose, and I chose to address Tom Davenport, Blogger of “Is Twitter For Serious Marketers.”

It was a busy week for viral messages, but ones that companies would never want to happen.

1) Dominos. Just created their very own twitter account, April 15th, TWO DAYS after the debacle involving two employees sharing a rather grotesque video of how they handle food at work. Dominos’ first posting can be found at: “#dominos video.- The pair was fired & criminal complaints filed. There are warrants for their arrest. http://bit.ly/12MX3n – please RT!”

Spokesman Tim McIntyre of Domino’s provided a statement on the situation, “Any idiot with a webcam and an internet connection can attempt to undo all that’s right about the brand,” Hmmm? Perhaps this is why smart companies are joining the social media conversation early and empowering their staff to positively represent their company to prevent occurrences like this from happening. After the fact statements like the President of Dominos on YouTube, have comments posted below such as:

“Sorry Mr. Dominos President. After that video it will be hard to eat out ANYWHERE but I will always think of Dominoes and my cheese being up someone’s nose.”

“I used to eat Dominos at least once a week. Not anymore. I can’t even look at a Dominos corporate logo without feeling queasy.”

Addressing the incident on the Today Show isn’t enough damage control for this one. Viral messages on Twitter such as “I don’t care what dominos does…never eating it again” seem to prevail.

2) Amazon or shall I say, #Amazonfail From Advertising Age: “By far the biggest issue most of the angry Twitterers had was that Amazon didn’t respond until late Sunday and, when it did, the vague answer it offered to CNet referred to the problem as a “glitch in the system” that was being fixed. This didn’t satisfy the masses who had already spent the better part of Easter getting fired up. The next response from Amazon came Monday night, when it issued a statement calling the incident an “embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error.”

Almost 24 hours later came the response. Why so late? They are one of, if not the biggest ecommerce e-tail stores out there. I just quickly looked up Amazon and I have no idea if they have an authentic Twitter account to this date. @amazondeals is listed in twibs, but all they do is list discounted items.

Social Media is not to be ignored, nor should you think that your company or persona is immune. Reputation Management and Social Media Strategy will be on the top of many company’s lists to implement in the near future if it has not been done so already. We learn from mistakes, Dominos will go down in the history books as “The Consequences of Not Taking Social Media Seriously”. Companies like Zappos, where they clearly take employee management and customer service to the next level will be the winners. “Happy Employees=Happy Customers is their motto. Whole Foods is another company that I would say stands out from the crowd and is doing a great job of listening to their customer chatter and responding quickly. I have seen them reply immediately to customer complaints, questions and suggestions such as “@laurenoboy Let your store know directly what you’d like to see. Every store decides its offerings in large part b/c of local demand.” They are a Twitterolemodels!