How Domino’s responded to prank video

Ann Arbor’s Domino’s Pizza deftly pioneered handling a public relations crisis spawned by new-age technology with the same type of technology.

Excerpt:

The saga of the prank Domino’s video could be a case study of how fast-moving social media can both giveth and taketh away.

It began April 13, when five YouTube clips showing a Domino’s Pizza employee performing unsavory acts with food began spreading on the video-sharing site.

One clip shows a male worker, identified in the amateur video only as Michael, sticking cheese up his nose and adding it to a sandwich. In another, Michael sneezes into a cheese steak sandwich “to be served to some unlucky customer that’s in need of some snot,” said the video’s shooter and narrator, who identified herself as Kristy. In a third, Michael rubs himself with a sponge, then uses it to clean a pan.

Predictably, the vast YouTube community was revulsed, yet watched anyway. Within a day, the clips had been viewed about 200,000 times, while anti-Domino’s comments began to spread on Twitter and other social media sources.

The videos were reposted on other sites, including GoodAsYou.org, a gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender activist site in New York. The site’s founder, Jeremy Hooper, sent an e-mail to Tim McIntyre, vice president of communications for the Ann Arbor, Mich., pizza chain.

“He said you need to see this,” McIntyre said. “Thirty minutes later, our internal social marketing team saw it and reached out to YouTube to take it down.”

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