Social Media tends to have a lot of Tsunami effects on people, companies, and celebrities.  The purpose of this case study is to take a closer look at the post-Tsunami damages and/or rewards on Domino’s Pizza.  One of the latest companies affected by a Social Media scandal.

Background: On Apr. 13, two Domino’s Pizza employees filmed themselves doing nasty jokes to cheese and other sandwich ingredients they were preparing for a delivery order.  Within two days, the video had been viewed more than a million times on Google’s  YouTube with over 300,000 comments.  On Apr. 15, Domino’s responded with another YouTube video message from Patrick Doyle, president of Domino’s USA.  He reached 650,000 views with almost 7,000 comments.

Challenge: Domino’s Pizza was faced with the challenge of re-establishing their clients’ and investor’s trust

• Discredit the content of the video and its producers
• Respond fast and efficiently in order to stop the snowball effect
• Minimize the issue to avoid alarming investors since the company’s share value had been dancing up and down with the lowest rates in the last 5 years.

Solution:          

• Utilize the same means of communication.  Replied with a YouTube video message and created @dpzinfo an official Twitter account
• Re-focused the attention of clients back to the product “pizza” by building alliances with bloggers and giving away free food in order to reconcile with the product.
•   Showed enough pro-activity to investors to reach the highest share value in the last 6 months. DPZ Reached up to 9.14 today (at 11:00 am), vs. 3.28 five months ago.

Assessing the situation:  It is extremely important to take Social Media to a higher level of strategic analysis.  It cannot be reduced to the number of friends/connections/followers, nor to the level of buzz, jokes or tags. These are all important factors in Social Media as long as they are intrinsically tied to the company’s performance.  

              Social Media Analysis: For this case study, I have tested an amazing Social Media monitoring tool called Techrigy.  It allows you to analyze the situation from all kinds of angles.  The following graphs will speak louder than my words:

Domino’s Pizza Social Media Traffic in the last month 

 It’s not a surprise to see the “Tsunami effect”. A huge traffic peak during the scandal, followed by calmer waters down to normal. This is typical in these situations and to be expected.

Now, where is this traffic coming from?

39% of the traffic comes from blogs, followed by 21% from microblogs.  The interesting fact to me is that only 11% of the traffic comes from video sites when one would expect this platform to have the highest percentage given that the cause of the scandal was a video. Expert comments are welcome!                                                                                                      

 The demographics are also very predictable as pizza is a lot more popular among young men than it is among women.  For the sake of recycling memory in this blog, the age graph has not been displayed but it shows that 79% of the traffic comes from a young population ranging from 18 to 35. 

Taking an even closer look, Techrigy allows you to measure the emotions and tones expressed in Social Media.  I found this to be a great opportunity for this case study, however it will be beneficial if our Techrigy friends joined this conversation and let the readers know how these factors are measured. The criteria used & statistical methods.  Having said this, let’s move on.

According to the Techrigy report, the tone of the traffic was 65% Neutral, followed by very positive (17% ) and positive (9.5%). It’s interesting because most of the comments I remember were negative and the report only shows 2% of negative tone and 6% traffic with very negative tone.  Maybe that’s how human minds function or it might just be my sick brain.  However, these are the facts despite what I remember.

 Now – Money Talks!

Since April 2007, the company’s share value has been steadily dropping.  Which means that there was an urgent need to shake Domino’s Pizza in order to change such a negative trend.   

Some bloggers are professing that this is the company’s awaited moment.  But wait a minute, aren’t we talking about a tragedy here?  I have no clue about finance, therefore, it would be better if I just try to take an objective look at the situation. 

 So, if we compare their share value and their traffic volume this month, there could be a correlation.  The significance of this correlation can only be discovered with time.  Let’s see what happens in one month in order to rename the scandal from a “Tragic” to a “Blessing”. However, the traffic went back to normal, while the share value keeps rising to the highest number in the last 6 months.  Not bad!  

My humble opinion: There are a few aspects to take into consideration here.  The first one is that Domino’s Pizza responded to the “scandal” with the right tools. Yes it was kind of late and weak, but they are giving it a try and the Social Mediasphere appreciated their effort. 

Social Media tends to react fast but with a delay of at least 12 to 24 hours.  At the same time, the stock market also tends to react with a delay of two/three days.  The only way Domino’s Pizza can avoid bringing the Tsunami effect from Social Media to the stock market is by creating sustainable trends that keep the real engagement.  The traffic has gone back to normal since Monday, April 27.  Let’s hope that the share value does not go back to normal by finding a way of keeping this momentum.

Now Mr. Doyle, Social Media is not the magic, it’s only a vehicle to your magic.  Show us the quality, the great service, the happy employees, the creativity. That is your magic!  Since we want to be part of this magic building process, here are some ideas :

A very practical idea is to empower the already existing tracker with a video monitoring tool. It would cost each store less than $100 to install a webcam and the application should not be more than $30K

You can let clients see how their food is being prepared from the time it’s ordered to the moment is given to the delivery staff.  If on top of that, you dare the client with a game (i.e. if we get there after 30 minutes, the pizza is on us) then you will have a real game with a steady trend.  This application can be easily installed on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Smart Phones. The sky is your limit. 

There are some other cool ideas hanging around the blogsphere.  But it would also be good to ask around.  In today’s economy, we need jobs, prosperity and hope.  I am sure that people will give you great ideas to help you become the best Pizza Company.  You now have a differential advantage that your competitors lack.  You are on the Social Media map!  Their share is $18.93 higher than yours but you can use this momentum to beat them.  Based on your traffic, readers will be happy to share ideas too.  Pay attention to Social Media and the spring of good ideas will be at your door for a long lasting harvest.

(For those of you who are new to our blog and do not come from our previous drupal site, I write these case studies for our clients in order apply Social Media to real cases using different angles of observation.  The fancy case study will be ready to download in a few days.  By fancy, I mean that all my personal comments will be removed, my English will be edited and the professional comments from the readers will be included.