“On Easter Sunday in a small mountain town, the intentionally playful actions of two employees quickly became a worldwide marketing nightmare for a large company franchise. A slow workday at Domino’s Pizza in Conover, N.C. prompted this duo to create videos showing a male sticking cheese up his nose and then putting it on a sandwich that was to be delivered to a customer. His cohort also filmed him partaking in other unsanitary acts with the food and uploaded the videos to YouTube.”
So begins a must-read article, “Domino’s delivers. . . after a vulgar video goes viral,” published at PR Tactics and The Strategist Online (by the Public Relations Society of America).
(While the original video has been pulled from YouTube, you can watch a news report that captures the lowlights.)
What does this bad-PR day for a pizza company have to do with government? Possibly, quite a lot.
First, I worry that some government employees/leaders who may already be resistant to the use of social media may find Domino’s “Bored Employee/Nose Cheese Sandwich” viral video proof that we must keep our employees a safe distance from all social media. That would be very unfortunate indeed, because the spread of social media use among government employees is well beyond containment. To paraphrase the Borg: “Resistance to social media is futile.” We will never put that genie back in the bottle. And besides, the potential for positive effect on citizen engagement via social media far outweighs the risks.
Today, we can no more ignore YouTube than that we can CNN. A much more important takeaway from the Domino’s experience is this: Will we in government be ready when something similar happens to us?
And while a prank video by a couple bored employees is unlikely, it is possible. Of greater likelihood is a video by a vindictive employee who was fired, or something inappropriate from a disgruntled employee, perhaps a release of “sensitive” information, or a hoax by someone impersonating a public employee. As one of the Domino’s management officials warned, “Anyone with a camera and an Internet link can cause a lot of damage.”
Additional obvious lessons include:
1. Agencies need expertise in all the media people use, especially social media, and they need it yesterday. Domino’s was caught flatfooted. When the crisis happened, they were still developing their social media strategy, and they hired a social media specialist only after the crisis was over. (Sound familiar?)
2. Don’t wait to build and maintain an agency presence on key social media platforms, because in the event of a communication crisis we will need already well-developed communications channels to help dispel misinformation. To get our two cents in, we must be part of the conversation. If faced with a problem similar to Domino’s, will we only use the communication tools in the legacy toolbox (news releases and media interviews)? Or will we be positioned to respond immediately using YouTube (can we currently produce a video in a less than 12 hours?), Twitter (how many follow us?), Facebook (do we have any “friends?”). And, for use during crises at least, every agency should have a public-facing blog with commenting enabled and moderated round the clock.
3. Fight fire with fire — use social media, not just (or mainly) legacy media to counter misinformation spread by social media. We should recognize there is often little or no audience crossover between social and legacy media. YouTubers are probably not watching tonight’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. To get the message to all audiences, we must use the media each audience prefers. We have to respond across all major social media platforms or we will not only miss important constituent segments, we may be seen as stodgy and old-fashioned, not to mention ineffectual.
4. Give employees reasonable guidelines for use of social media that encourages constructive engagement inside AND outside the agency — enough rules to deter this kind of video from being uploaded, but not so many rules that we kill creativity or eliminate meaningful, authentic engagement with citizens.
When this type of crisis happens to a government agency — and we should expect it to happen some time in the future — will we be ready to begin “counter-viral” communication operations immediately? Do our national press offices have the capability to produce a video in a few hours and get it uploaded to YouTube? It took Domino’s 48 hours to get their video response on YouTube, but by that time nearly a million people had already seen the hoax video. It was already too late to perform damage control.
Before this kind of communication crisis happens in government, perhaps agencies should prepare now. Some agencies with public health and safety or national security responsibilities may consider creating a “Viral Video Response Team.” (OK, we may not call it that, but you get the idea.) At the very least, every agency with video production capacity should know who those video production employees are and how to reach them after hours or on weekends. If the agency doesn’t already have dedicated social media specialists, a) get some, or b) identify social media-savvy volunteers. A simple plan will be helpful, but keep it simple and don’t overdo it — the crisis might happen before you finish it.
Again, perhaps most importantly, don’t delay development of agency presence across social media, because if we are absent from today’s conversations on key social media platforms, it will be way too late to join when a crisis occurs. And if that happens, we won’t just see our pizza sales suffer, we’ll see public trust plummet.
Interesting idea – rapid response video/SM teams for crisis communications. Thanks for posting this.
There’s another angle with this which is contributing to debate on YouTube which I gave an example of here http://paulcanning.blogspot.com/2008/04/could-british-teacher-ever-do-this.html
This is the message I try to get across when I speak because I get the feeling people don’t feel the urgency to get on board yet. But as you point out, this is important and is something that takes time. You don’t just sign on and immediately build a following and trust. And having a devoted fan base can certainly help pull any organization through a communications crisis.
I don’t think people not invested in social media realize that we have been lucky to have been given this time to ramp up our understanding and use of social networking before everyone starts to realize the damage that really can be done. For all of you in local government, think about the disruption one disgruntled resident already can do just by contacting aldermen, attending council meetings, writing editorials, etc. whether they are right or wrong. Now imagine if that same person, who can sometimes be quite fanatical about their agenda, realizes the power of social media. And imagine if you had nothing in place to counter the attack.
Agree, social media could erupt from anywhere and you need to have people in place before it happens and a plan before it happens to deal with damage control. I think Dominoes did a good job getting out fast and early, although it was clearly scripted and maybe if it was more authentic it would have been better. But the government should put more people in place in agencies to help train and inform about the uses and pros and cons that could develop and proper ways to handle situations.
You also have to use the tools of the internet to constantly scan for the images, videos and postings. Tools are already available to do this.
Does anyone have any ideas for how videos that are not individually viral, but in their category become viral, might be impacting on social mores? I have noticed that a lot of young people are posting videos of fights they’ve been at, or of crazy behavior when drunk or drugged. Each video may not be viral on their own, but start adding them up and it gets worrisome that these are influencing young peoples’ sense of what is cool and what not. How and which agencies should be monitoring this sort of material with a view to being responsive?
My blog post’s point was that if gov or politicians is encouraging or initiating debate on a subject then why is it not feeding back to and developing/nurturing that debate on video sites such as YouTube?
What I found was a lot of young people with high view counts discussing – of all things – the meaning of citizenship.
This was after PM Gordon Brown has started off a debate on citizenship.
The discussion between (mainly young women) via their webcams was obviously started off by this but I would bet money the government was unaware of this debate’s existence – because it would probably be the least thing they’d expect, young people interested in politics! What they would probably expect would be users to come to the Number Ten Downing Street website and ask a question or comment on the PM’s YouTube channel.
So an opportunity lost.
@Wendy
this is a major thing for media attention in the UK but I haven’t seen any surveys on prevalence though it is an extension of video-sharing on mobiles and similar to online bullying, which has ramped up, I think, how much damage bullying can cause.
As I was saying in the previous comment, I think government needs to help young people fight this by helping and promoting and resourcing them. In terms of monitoring I think the responsibility is with the websites and that’s been the general conclusion in the UK – the police don’t have the resources. YouTube has consequently been forced to amend its rules on what will be removed because of media/government pressure. Here you have a bigger challenge than us because of the First Amendment!