Lotame

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.

Our friends at MySpace just released a study, featured in AdAge, on the impact of Social Media from an ROI perspective. They partnered with an offline tracking program, Dunnhumby, which runs loyalty programs for supermarket retailers and has access to loyalty-card purchase data from 59 million people in the U.S. The campaign in question was for an unnamed personal-care brand that ran a $1 million campaign on MySpace last year, including a contest in which members submitted videos of themselves and friends for others in the network to vote on. (I think that this was P&G’s Crest promotion, but that is just an educated guess.) The study which described the reach and click thru rates as being below average, also uncovered the most important statistic:

It produced $1.28 million in offline sales, as measured by Dunnhumby, which compared purchases among shoppers not exposed to the campaign with purchases among those who were. That amounted to a 28% return on investment, not counting returns from repeat sales among consumers the brand won via the campaign.

This is good news for those people who searching for answers surrounding effective measurement tools to understand the value of a social media marketing campaign.

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• Social Networking Sites Still Struggling With The Whole Monetization Thing (techdirt.com)
• My take on the P&G; Tide Loads of Hope and #pgdigital (hardknoxlife.com)
• Forget Social Media Measurement. Get Back to the Basics. (kylelacy.com)

In Social Media Marketing campaigns a common goal is to achieve a higher “Word of Mouth” quotient. Simple put, an ideal use of media and marketing inside a community is to get people talking about your product. Lotame’s own business intelligence unit has some new evidence about how to effect the results positively if your goal is “Word of Mouth”:

A survey conducted in tandem with a campaign targeting a teen audience showed that teen “influencers” (those users who exhibit behaviors around content production, posting, uploading, commenting, etc) who were exposed to ads were 20.7% more likely to generate buzz for the show than users who had never seen the ads. When we narrowed that down to just users who reported chatting, commenting, or sending an article about the series, we found that those users were 49.3% more likely to generate buzz for the show than users who had never seen the ads.

What does this mean for marketers? By concentrating on locating and targeting media to those people who present themselves with activities indicative of  influencing the community is an important step to seeding the conversations with your brand message.

We are looking forward to more data from our business intelligence group, that will reveal new tactics on how these “influencers” behave and how to talk with them.