By now, most of you have heard or read about the two Domino’s employees who decided to film their exploits and post them on YouTube. The speed at which the video spread should be nothing surprising to those of us who live and work in the social media arena. Rather then revisit what happened, I wanted to talk a little about what could or should have been done differently.
Let’s analyze what happened:
Monday (April 13, 2009)
- Domino’s is alerted by a blogger – Video has now been viewed over one million times!
- Commenters at the site Consumerist.com use clues, in the video, to find the franchise location.
Tuesday (April 14, 2009)
- Domino’s fires the employees and brings in the local health department which advised them to discard all open containers of food.
- Employees apologize in email to company.
- Domino’s contemplates how to respond.
- Twitter users start asking what Dominoes is going to do about it.
Wednesday (April 15, 2009)
- YouTube is removed due to a copyright claim by Ms. Hammonds (one of the employees who filmed it)
- Domino’s CEO responds on YouTube and also sets up a Twitter account @dpzinfo to respond to comments
If you were in charge, what would you have done differently to protect your brand?
- Should the CEO have posted the YouTube video on Monday night?
- Should Domino’s have a department/group that monitors the Internet for issues that could impact their branding in a negative way? A quick response unit if you will?
- Is there really anything that Domino’s could do to prevent this in the future?
- Should a company be able to ask that a video, such as the one posted, be pulled immediately from YouTube?
