Twitter Job for Summer Internal at Pizza Hut
Social Networking of Corporate Importance for Pizza Hut. The news is out: Pizza Hut, fearing the Domino effect, have decided to act. Not that they want to improve their Pizza’s but they want to prevent or fight a potential negative Buzz on social networks, namely on Twitter.
The Domino Background
Last month Domino Pizza Employees put a clip on YouTube, showing some amazing footage of how they prepare Pizzas for Customers; the scenes are disgusting for the least and have caused tremendous damage to Domino. Domino’s CE intervened publicly; the clip is also available on Youtube.
The employees have been kicked out, accused, jailed and the concerned Domino outlet has been closed.
The story must have scared the Mozzarella out of Pizza Hut considering that all these large fast food organizations obey the same sanitary standards and hire the same employee profile.
Pizza Hut’s Twitter Patch
As reported by the New York Times Pizza Hut has released the profile for a “Twintern”, a person paid to Twitter as a summer job, a Summer Twitterer so to speak. The Goal is to know what’s going on out there in the big world of consumes and to communicate Pizza Hut messages, wrapped up in 140 letters, to the large crowd of world wide Twitterers.
Surprising marketing strategy with the transparency of suicidal blindness. Twitter Watch openly declared, could have quite a negative impact as the intentions, even well masked by smooth PR blah-blah, remain doubtful, not really customer centered and even less in any way beneficial for social network users. I see the action as the right thing at the wrong time rushed into based on emotion, that emotion being fear.
The wind has turned: earlier, corporates used to abuse of emotional PR elements to stuff products down the throat of consumers, today the consumers trigger emotions which drive Corporates into defensive marketing strategies, weakening thus their image, brand and product in the market.
If this is the direction social networks can give to these corporates who sucked out people for so long with the ever present ‘be patriot, consume’ approach, then we are definitely going towards a better future. Most people on social networks have not been waiting for this commercial fuss nor for the hypocrisy of Corporate Marketing Departments who lack imagination and creativity to adapt to a world where things have already changed.
Oh, by the way, I am not writing in the confined space of locked up social networks, but publicly, officially and Google efficiently. Bury your bad reputation in Social Networks, there is a long way to go from there to shut up what’s on Google.
The Real Problem
The real problem is not to prevent the negative buzz, but to take care of staff in a way that such situations like on Domino will not arise. It’s also about quality control and probably employing more people to carry out such controls and in the end, the problem is that companies don’t employ people who actually qualify for the jobs they have been entrusted with. It’s a matter of money, training, controls and permanent improvement of performance, performance not in the shortcut ROI way, but quality oriented performance which will entail increase of ROI over the long term.
The real problem is that Management is not paid for excellence but for bottom line, perversely at any price.
Things have changed out there and trust, built over years can crumble down in no time. Push Marketing won’t do the trick anymore. Mind control strategies are still en vogue but they need to be tweaked in function of the enlightenment of the most recent studies about consumer and social networkers’ behavior.
The behavioral marketing strategies are a brilliant way to sneak back to basics, called ‘common sense’. In fact you don’t need a highly paid guru or even a whole bunch of them: just ask your kids and mother and grandmothers, your neighbors or friends in social networks to find out, how people feel about outdated defensive patch strategies designed to heal rather than to prevent.
Or better: ask yourself!
PS: I may return to Pizza Hut when their main focus is on clean Pizzas not on smoth Talk.