Lessons from the Amazon, Domino's Debacles

In an age of social media, companies must respond instantly to Internet controversies that imperil their brands. Here's how to prepare

By B.L. Ochman

These are confusing days for companies used to doing business by pre-Internet rules. We're in an age of conversation, collaboration, and real-time communication. It's not just how we communicate that has changed, but also how products are created, sold, bought, and evaluated.

Corporations' old-fashioned, secretive, top-down approach to communication is being turned on its head. Power has shifted to consumers, and change is happening at dizzying speed.

Just ask Amazon.com (AMZN) and Domino's Pizza (DPZ). Both brands have sustained heavy damage in recent days and neither company was prepared to confront or contain crises that wound up greatly amplified in the blogosphere.

As you've surely heard by now, on Apr. 13, two Domino's Pizza employees turned the 50-year-old company's reputation to toast after they filmed themselves doing nasty things to cheese and other sandwich ingredients they said were about to be sent out to customers. Within two days, the video had been viewed more than a million times on Google's (GOOG) YouTube. As of Apr. 17, a Google search for "Dominos" still turned up multiple, prominent references to the video, including one in the third-highest spot. Late on Apr. 15, Domino's responded with a YouTube video message from Patrick Doyle, president of Domino's USA. By late the following day, the video had only about 66,000 views.

"Punk'd by Social Media"

Just days before the Domino's debacle, Amazon was plunged into a controversy of its own. Overnight, sales rankings and search results for gay and lesbian books seemed to disappear from Amazon's Web site. Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and other online forums erupted with criticism. Amazon said nothing for two days until it told the Associated Press that there was a "glitch" in its system. Twitter users immediately responded by attaching a tag (#glitchmyass) to their tweets that made it abundantly clear that they weren't buying Amazon's explanation.

In response to my AdAge post on Amazon's silence, a commenter said the social-media firestorm might have made a million or so people aware of either problem—a number he insisted isn't big enough to have long-term impact on the brand. But a million people are enough to swing an election, populate a fair-sized city, and turn a book or movie into a hit. And if each of those million people tells just one other person, the brand damage begins to multiply.

Domino's quickly was added to a long, growing list of brands that have been, in the words of Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang, "punk'd by social media.".

I've got some advice for companies that want to keep their brands off that list of shame.

1. Monitor your brand 24/7. We live in a 24/7 world. Deal with it. Information flows in real time. Finding out tomorrow about a problem isn't soon enough.

There are numerous free and paid tools for monitoring social media.

But monitoring is not enough.