Backround

A couple of Domino's employees posted an immature video of themselves contaminating the food at their local Domino's.

This video went viral.  Within days it was viewed nearly 1.3 MILLION times, was embedded in about 300 blogs and had well over EIGHT THOUSAND comments.  This was a social disaster.

Domino's responded the very next day, posting a sincere, honest and personal video on YouTube.

While the speed and strategy of this response was commendable, the video response only netted just over 306K views, 86 blog posts and 3K comments.

Social outrage clearly travels faster than an apology or response.

Key Takeaways

While Domino's took all the right steps after the fact, there is a lot they could have done before the disaster struck to soften the blow in the event of a social disaster.

• They could have leveraged a community of advocates or supporters, if they had one.
• They could have utilized their friends and followers on Twitter or Facebook, if they already had these relationships in place. (note: Domino's is on Twitter at @dpzinfo speaking to 300 people after the fact)
• They could have directed all of the sympathetic supporters referenced in their video to an advocacy page or community.  They could have even collected verbatims and shared them online.  If they onlhy had the infrastructure setup to support this.

No matter how hard you erase, you cannot unprint the digital conversation.  

Response allows you to enter the conversation.  But conversational presence and readiness before the incident would have enabled a stronger response and possibly even a dampend the impact of the offending viral message.  If only...

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PS - is this a sustainable proposal? Would you ever recommend these steps to a client?  I would.  But not as a response.  Response and disaster recovery are a fringe benefit of advocacy, but not the sole purpose or social marketing.