Dominos has been the latest brand to take a bit of a shoeing in the social media echo chamber, following the amazingly fast spread of this video, showing two animals in a Dominos kitchen treating customers to some extra "goodies" on their sandwiches.
I've had my run-ins with Dominos. In late 2006 I convinced myself I was going to die in my sleep against a toilet, thanks to my first ever dose of food poisoning. No prizes for guessing where I'd bought my pizza. Still, they've since been forgiven and I've been able to look at their recent crisis objectively. After I'd finished laughing.
Xzibit, a leading (and excellent) West Coast rapper and regular Twitter user, picked some choice and fitting language to share this with his 13,804 followers. Not a good thing to have so many people put off your brand in less than 140 characters - and that's without all the retweets!
Any huge food brand like Dominos could've been the victim of this issue, and in a sense they can be considered unlucky to have employed this pair of socially stunted morons. More interesting, though, has been watching Dominos' response.
I covered this for our internal newsletter and my tone probably suggested that Dominos had been a little slow in responding. I still think that's partly true, but the fact is they've taken some very appropriate action.
Dominos quickly identified the restaurant shown in the YouTube clip, and dismissed the staff involved. There is also now a pair of snot-covered felony warrants out for their arrests. Pwn3d.
With that all sorted, Dominos took their response to the exact place where the crisis began. I heartily endorse this practice.
They have posted a video (below) on YouTube of Dominos USA president Patrick Doyle. The tone of the video is just right. Doyle's statement is sombre, regretful and emphatic. He reassures us that the two scumbags in the video have been severely dealt with and have more to come, that the restaurant has been scrubbed from top to bottom, that 99.9% of Dominos staff aren't subhuman pondlife, and that Dominos is very, very sorry.
Nicely done. And there's a twist in the tale too, a piece of PR spin so brilliant that I couldn't help but be impressed. Doyle refers to the incident as a YouTube "hoax", and later says that the two employees in the clip claimed that to be so.
In doing this, Doyle, without saying it's all a storm in a teacup, just sews the seeds of doubt - maybe these were just two wayward, misguided individuals having a laugh. Maybe there were no boogers.
With their response - which could have been a little faster - Dominos have simultaneously fully and comprehensively addressed a problem and introduced the possibility that it wasn't as serious as it sounded. And the video is titled in such a way that it will pop up in any search for the original vid. Nice work.
Liveblogging is something that I, as a football blogger, probably should have tackled earlier. I didn't do so because I still fancy myself as a football writer, so I like to write my match reports in full, usually published right on the final whistle.
Liveblogging is ideal for certain situations. Sport is one, but there are many possible business applications for companies so inclined. If you have a dedicated readership, online community or fan-base, liveblogging could be right for your business.For example, events or press conferences can be liveblogged. In the right industry, launches and quick one-day-only developments can also be the subject of a liveblog.
Most relevant software has chatroom or commenting functionality, so question and answer sessions could easily be held in a liveblogging platform. The beauty of this is that once embedded into your blog, readers can follow the updates live with no need to refresh (and no need for you to constantly republish).
Over the Easter weekend I conducted my first live blog, quite simply a blow-by-blow account of Saturday afternoon's Premier League fixtures.
I found it to be an enjoyable and rewarding experience. People read it, and joined in. I got real time feedback which is unavailable through other methods of covering the same sort of event. Without resorting to steam-of-consciousness bullshit rhetoric, it was liberating to be relaying my thoughts to (a few) people live and uncensored.
If a business is open to its employees, or selected employees, blogging and tweeting on its behalf, liveblogging is not problematic, and could provide a great way - as already mentioned - of communicating particular goings-on.
When you've taken the decision to liveblog your event or press conference, it's time to find a way of doing it. It is possible to directly liveblog through your blog proper, but this can be arduous and looks incredibly untidy in your subscribers' RSS readers. It also moves an comment into the blog's comments section, rendering discussion difficult.
Better, then, to let a third party create an embeddable widget for you. This can then be placed in a one-off blog post which does not, in itself, need refreshing.
A recommendation from Ginge, via Jason, led me to use Cover it Live for my first liveblog, and to be perfectly honest it was so flawless that I'll be using it from now on unless they make drastic changes to it.
CiL looks fantastic - modern and clean - and gives the user loads of flexibility over the way the liveblog session works. And here's more good news for businesses: Cover it Live Enterprise (PDF) lets you set up a permanent live panel on your page. There must be plenty of possible uses for that!
I love Nine Inch Nails. I love the ethos and the innovation. But most of all, I love the music - so you'll have to forgive me if this post is too fawning. And it will be.
In his latest innovation in music/fan technology, Trent Reznor has launched the Nine Inch Nails iPhone app. In typical NIN style, it looks like it's been pretty damn well done, and there are many reasons why I think it's very, very cool.
I thoroughly recommend you watch the video embedded below, from WiReD. It shows Reznor and Rob Sheridan running through the features of the app. The whole of NIN.com has been rendered for the iPhone, meaning the app operates as a fully operational website, including membership functions.
This brings to the iPhone the social nature of NIN.com. Reznor is a great advocate of fan rights, and consistently provides raw materials for fan mash-ups. All of this is available on the new app, including a huge library of downloadable photographs. At this point, it's worth noting that the Nine Inch Nails iPhone app is free.
But the really amazing thing about this app is Nearby. Sheridan says Nearby is "kind of like Twitter within the Nine Inch Nails network". Sounds ok so far, but really it's more like a location-based Yammer.
It's a members-only GPS-enabled messaging tool which allows conversation between NIN fans (and Reznor, probably) and can be filtered by location. That's pretty social. And they've even thought of the personal security risks, by adding a location fuzziness option.
Trent = genius.
(Photo: Synthtopia)
Okay, the Twitter backlash is starting to irritate me rather a lot. Way back when I first signed up, I didn't get it and I thought it was pointless. Then I started using it and now I'm hooked - and I'm not the only one.
But more and more people are signing up because of all the celebrities who use it - some properly, some not - and they don't understand how to use it. They then combine with all the skeptics and, for some reason, feel the need to slag it off. It's nothing new, of course. Some people, me included, are just miserable bastards.
Last night I was listening, against my better judgement, to BBC Radio 5 Live, and @richardpbacon's guest said what people always say when they don't use it, don't get it and assume, because they hear about it through the likes of Bacon and Tim Lovejoy, that it's about hearing what some half-celebrity had for lunch: "it's pointless".
If you use Twitter to starf*ck, it is pointless. But here's some of the stuff I get out of it:
Rant over.
(Photo: Uniquities)
With a little help from our marketing team here at Porter Novelli, one of my humble blog posts got picked up this week by Freshbusinessthinking.com.
You can (re-)read my post "13 bleedin' obvious tips for writing a good blog post" here, if you so wish. It's pretty basic stuff, but that was kinda my intention. Also, I'm delighted to see that tip number 11 - "Slag off Harry Redknapp" - remained intact. I'm more pleased that I held back, my true opinion on the old sod would've been unprintable.
At the risk of upsetting my fellow geek-folk, I have to admit that I think the X-Men movies are crap and the last movie to fill me with as much apathy as X-Men Origins: Wolverine probably starred Keanu Reevezzzzz.
But what does interest me is online stupidity, those moments of such arrogance/ignorance that one can barely stifle the chuckles. And it just so happens that good old X-Men has provided such a story.
I'll let the BBC website take up the matter:
"A US columnist is out of a job after posting an online review of an illegally downloaded copy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine."Roger Friedman, who wrote the piece on his regular column, had worked at the Fox news website for 10 years.
"The journalist wrote in his column on Thursday that downloading the 20th Century Fox film was 'so much easier than going out in the rain'."
Here in the Porter Novelli digital igloo we have hundreds of unwritten rules - don't astroturf, don't pretend to be someone you're not, don't write in technobabble. But top of the list is don't be a bloody idiot.
The rights (pun intended) and wrongs of piracy - or whatever you want to call it - are for another post on another day. But in our increasingly digital and even-more-increasingly social media lives it's is so important to think about what we're saying and what the implications might be.
Friedman, in bragging about how he got his hands on the movie in question, was incredibly stupid. But to do it in his Fox News column is frankly mind-boggling.
Remember - be careful out there, digi-folk.
(Photo: ET Online)
