Thursday 16 April 2009

Dominoes employees rapidly deliver worst kind of brand experience due to the infectious power of Twitter

On Tuesday this week, because of a posting I spotted on Twitter, I saw the Dominoes horror movie that had just been posted on YouTube.

In case you missed the video it basically showed two employees at Dominoes doing some pretty ghastly ‘tricks’ with cheese and salami while making sandwiches for an unsuspecting home delivery customer.

In matter of days, as a result of the retweeting function of Twitter, this video nasty had been viewed by over one million people.

Dominoes are a large brand that has invested effort and dollars carefully building their brand reputation. Overnight this reputation has been tarnished, partly because of the way retweets can spread this type of story like wildfire.

In my view this very clearly demonstrates the infectious and potentially dangerous power of social media, which is now being dramatically accelerated by Twitter.

This is scary stuff.

In a week when Amazon also got caught out by the speed of Twitter it is time for brand organisations to rewrite the rules about how they approach crisis management.

If you are responsible for brand experience management in your organisation be warned. This type of issue is probably going to become more common, I therefore recommend you put together a savvy and agile team who really get how social media works and who are prepared to proactively manage this type of situation.

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