Fighting fire with fire, businesses turn to YouTube

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When a prank video of a Domino's Pizza employee adding unsanitary ingredients to sandwiches became an instant hit on YouTube, the chain didn't respond in the traditional way with a statement issued through the mainstream media.
Instead, Domino's delivered its message directly to the same audience by posting its own YouTube video, an angry denunciation of the two employees involved and an apology from Domino's USA President Patrick Doyle. The company also activated a Twitter account, used its Facebook page to respond to the buzz and received help tracking down the employees from tech-savvy blog readers.
"We needed to fight fire with fire," said Domino's spokesman Tim McIntyre.
While unusual, the incident last month provided a vivid example of why businesses and marketing experts are increasingly turning to the popular and fast-moving social networks.
Firms are learning that using the various forms of new media can establish a direct dialogue with customers about products or services. That approach can generate buzz, which can be as effective as an expensive advertising campaign or traditional media coverage.
"The holy grail of marketing is always word of mouth," said Dave Roberts of Vyatta Inc., an open-source networking firm in Belmont, Calif.
Clearly, the online audience is already there.
A recent Nielsen Co. report found that the number of social-media users has increased 87 percent since 2003, and surpassed e-mail use for the first time in February. In the past year, the time spent on social networks increased 73 percent, Nielsen said.
The "meteoric growth" of social networks is "the single most significant story in the online media space today," the report said.
For businesses, the social-media phenomenon is rewriting the rules about customer service and outreach. "Looking forward, marketers will ignore these communities at their own peril," Nielsen said.
Companies such as Vyatta are trying to cover all the bases.
"We participate in every social-media mechanism that we can," said Roberts, Vyatta's vice president of strategy and marketing. "We're on Facebook, we've got a LinkedIn group, we monitor what people are saying about us on Twitter. When someone tweets at us, we take a look at it."
Digital-storage manufacturer Seagate Technology LLC has increased its social-media strategy in the past six months, said spokesman Woody Monroy. The company has a Facebook fan page, a YouTube channel, a Friendfeed and recently began staff-written blogs.
"We have people who Twitter officially for Seagate," Monroy said. "We moved slowly. We didn't want to jump into this thing and assume we knew how to do this right the first time. It isn't a traditional marketing program; it's more of a communications channel."
Domino's Pizza officials found they had to quickly engage the social-media sphere when five video clips surfaced on YouTube on April 13. In one clip, a worker inserts cheese up his nose. He then places the cheese on a sandwich. In another video, the worker purportedly sneezes on a sandwich.
Within 48 hours, the clips had been viewed nearly 1 million times and reposted to other sites. Social networks buzzed with negative comments about Domino's by disgusted viewers.
At that point, Domino's decided to go right after the same audience and posted its own two-minute video of its president, Doyle, angrily denouncing the employees.
Also by then, viewers of the blog Consumerist.com tracked down the Domino's employees and store location in Conover, N.C., using clues in the clips and the original video post.
The employees, identified as Kristy Hammonds, 31, and Michael Setzer, 32, have claimed that the video was a joke and that no tainted food left the store. However, they were fired and charged by local law-enforcement authorities with felony food tampering. The U.S. Food and Drug administration is also looking into the case for possible federal charges, said McIntyre, Domino's spokesman.
McIntyre said the chain's own video did draw more attention to the original videos, especially after the mainstream media picked up on the story. But he said the strategy helped Domino's put the incident "in context" and that the vast majority of comments via phone and e-mail indicate that people saw the video for what is was -- an isolated prank.
But Glenn Kessler, president and CEO of HCD Research, said Domino's still needs to employ traditional image-building tactics in mainstream media to prevent long-term problems.
A survey HCD did the week the videos surfaced found that only about 15 percent of respondents were likely to order from Domino's after they had seen the prank video, a number that went up to only 24 percent after the same respondents viewed the apology video.

(E-mail Benny Evangelista at bevangelista(at)sfchronicle.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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