Twitter scares the Mozzarella out of 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.

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.

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 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.

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Related posts:

1. Socal Media Mar­ket­ing — Your Busi­ness on CNN
2. Social Media Mar­ket­ing by Ycademy

Tags: Google, Pizza Hut, PizzaHut, The New York Times, Twitter, Yorgo Nestoridis, YORGOO Publishing

This entry was posted on April 22, 2009 at 5:58 pm and is filed under Editorial, Marketing, Media, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Twitter, Yorgo Nestoridis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.