The Domino's Case: How employees can harm a brand through Social Media

Please, if you are having dinner, my apologies. Good news? This case is from years ago and it happen on the other side of the world.

We all know Domino's, the multinational fast food franchise specialized in pizzas. Well, what happen to them a few years ago has to be a company's worst nightmare... A couple of their employees in a restaurant in the U.S. decided to make a very distasteful video of them adding 'extra' disgusting ingredients to the food and messing with it in the kitchen, and then uploaded the video to Youtube. After finding out about this incident, Domino's fired the employees and closed the restaurant for sanitation. They were also sued for delivering prohibited food, even though the employees stated that none of those products were sold.

Thanks to the velocity with which news travel in the Internet, the video got over a million views in hours. "References to it were in five of the 12 results on the first page of Google search for 'Dominos', and discussions about Domino’s had spread throughout Twitter." (The New York Times).

But the mistake was that the CEO reacted late and began publishing apologies on printed media, instead of social media, where everything was still happening. Eventually, he released his own Youtube video, and even though it was a good call, it did not have the expected impact.  Because... Why would I think everything is all right now? There are hundreds of restaurants world-wide and there has to be another pair of crazy pranksters in the world that could mess with my food, right?

I would rather not to think about this anymore. 

So, what were the consequences of this prank video? As usual, I leave you with a little graphic below.
As for tangible consequences, I think the expenses made in legal proceedings against the former employees and the risk of the company being sued, which luckily did not happen. In addition, there is the loss of income from that particular restaurant because it was closed and the costs of sanitizing it. 

But Domino's is a big company, that amount of money must have been nothing for them, what I think were the outcomes that really hurt them at the time, were the ones related to their customers. Although they kind-of gain publicity from the incident, it was bad publicity, and in this case I do not think there is such thing as 'bad publicity is better than no publicity', no way, we are dealing with health here. 

The fall in the company's reputation, the loss of customers' trust in the brand and all the negative comments on Twitter and other social media were motives enough for Domino's to improve their social game.

Domino's decided to double the stakes and face a brand reposition strategy and reputation management, by using Twitter to hear what their customers had to say and reach out to them, in campaigns such as Domino's Pizza Turnaround, where they expected customers to say anything bad about the pizzas so they could work on that. It had a great amount of feedback from Twitter and they actually change the products, but the questions in some customers still remained, 'How do I know it is for real?', well, hopefully Domino's will prove itself.

That was a case of poor ethics from the employees, and the 8 Ethical Principles (Rogerson & Fidler, n.d) were violated in some way. The actions were not correct, even if the employees did not put the items for sale, it was a totally inappropriate behaviour and showed no respect for their company, customers and fellow employees, they were unprofessional and represented their organisation as one with low quality and health standards. Finally, they did not think about the huge consequences for the company and themselves, of posting the video online or, for that matter, making it in the first place.

Prevent this type of behaviours from employees in social media is really complicated, but as mentioned in the Key risks and concerns of E2.0 (Dawson, 2008), training and clear policies might minimize the risks of events like this happening. Also, keeping staff motivated and growing their attachment and commitment to the company could be another way of precluding this actions.

I think I extended this post a little, but I really enjoyed blogging about Enterprise 2.0 today, hopefully I will carry on with this blog.

So, tell me...

What do you think about employees behaviours on Social Media?

Don't forget to comment and follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and even LinkedIn. (Links here and on the top right side, above my face). 

References

Dawson, R., Hough, J., Hill, J., Winterford, B., & Alexandrov, D. (2008). Implementing enterprise 2.0. San Francisco; Sydney: Advanced Human Technologies.

Rogerson, S., & Fidler, C. (n.d.). A practical perspective on information ethics. Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/322961/A_Practical_Perspective_of_Information_Ethics

Want to know more?

Video Prank at Domino’s Taints Brand

Domino's: How One YouTube Video Can Ruin a Brand (Updated)

Caso Domino's Pizza: Crisis y Reputation Management

Domino's Pizza on the Today Show - Workers fired for Dominos prank video

Domino's President Responds To Prank Video