Lotame

This paper was originally created to share our continued understanding of how powerful Social Media is as a Marketing, Branding, Advertising, PR tool. The case in hand was some work we did for a big peanut butter brand with respects to education around the Salmonella outbreak earlier this year, but timing sometimes is everything. We “unofficially” released this white paper on Monday 4/23/2009 and the following day Domino’s Pizza had it’s own Social Media PR nightmare on it’s hands (which I thought they handled very well.) NY Times reporter, Stephanie Clifford quickly got on the phone with me, and Lotame ended up providing background comments on “Video Prank at Domino’s Taints Brand” that ran in the the Media and Advertising Section of last Thursday print edition.

Here is the White Paper that got us into the NY Times, pretty powerful findings and recommendations:

Successfully Using Social Media for Crisis Management eDoc

Yesterday I had a great conversation, about PR Crisis Management with Social Media, with Stephanie Clifford over at the New York Times. I gave her some background info on an article she was writing about the unfortunate events that Domino’s Pizza has had to deal with over the last few days. I have blogged and twitted about the issue extensively. Thanks to Stephanie for giving Lotame some exposure in the very esteemed NY Times!

The article can be accessed here:

Video Prank at Domino’s Taints Brand- New York Times, Media & Advertising, 4/15/09

Yesterday we became aware of some video(s) that was circulating around the web, of a pair of “domino employees” doing some very disgusting things to the food that they were preparing for customers. The video is below.

UPDATE: Patrick Doyle - President Domino’s USA Responds (10:25 PM 4/15/09)

Here is the original video (UPDATE: 11/16/09 Youtube has taken down most of the Domino’s Videos)

My friend Ian Schafer, the CEO of Deep Focus first made me aware of the situation over at his blog. The net/net of the situation is that the video(s) were out there and created a tremendous amount of conversation (mostly bad) about Dominio’s Pizza, and about the potential for social media creating a negative impact on brand image (mostly thoughtful). AdAge is due to run a story about this instance this morning. (UPDATE: AdAge posted the Story)

THE CHALLENGE

To all my my Social Media Marketing experts and gurus, let’s give Domino’s and the rest of the QSR (Quick Serve Resturant) Industry some ideas on what they can do to protect their brands (currently and in the future). Please leave your ideas in the comments section, so others can build off those ideas or disagree. My hope is to get some real intelligent thinking about this issue, and share it back with everyone interested. I suspect Domino’s marketing executives are reading this blog (and ever other blog talking about this issue) so make the ideas good. I will also be looking at the ideas, and may ask the creators of the best ideas to join me on special episode of the Social Media Remix radio show dedicated to this issue.

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• Video Prank At Domino’s Taints Brand (nytimes.com) = with comments from Lotame.