Both brands, for different reasons, have suffered bruising “web-storms”. Fortunately, no one dies in these kinds of storms, but reputations can get blown away in a matter of hours or so it seems. Domino’s will now join the growing list of famous brands who got punk’d on the web, following in the footsteps of the Dells and Jet Blues of this world.

Looking at the graph below, which is based on a qualified sample of web conversations across 41 communities, there was no way for Domino’s to keep this “on the down low”, as seemed to be the preferred strategy in the early stages of the crisis.

Domino's video: buzz trend (tracked by linkfluence)

More importantly, the incident quickly spread across various communities in a matter of a couple of days, as mass media exposure turbo-charged viral propagation of the incident over and across social networks and online communities:

In terms of “buzz volume”, it appears Domino’s even vaulted past AIG on April 16, which is no small feat. (The two pizza employees did not manage however to beat the buzz generated by another Internet sensation this week: Scotland’s new web-celeb’, Susan Boyle).

comparison on of buzz trends: AIG, Domino's, Susan Boyle (tracked by linkfluence)

For all the Sturm und Drang over this most distasteful video, the crisis has probably already peaked. With the arrest of the two pranksters, and a message of apology from Domino’s CEO, Patrick Doyle in a YouTube video, the story appears to have now run its course. This was probably a shrewd move, already tried and tested by JetBlue’s CEO and Starbucks in response to YouTube-powered controversies.

Although Patrick Doyle’s video (orange line in the graph below) has only received a tiny fraction of the total number of views obtained by the initial video (purple line), it was released quickly enough, at the tail end of the story cycle, to benefit from a good amount of exposure in subsequent articles and posts.

number of links to employees' video (Orange line) and CEO apology video (purple line) - measured by linkfluence

Unfortunately for the company however, the fact that attention is already shifting away from the incident does not imply its reputation will not suffer lingering effects.

Clearly, the long term impact of this episode will need to be tracked and measured for some time as part of the recovery process. And as Domino’s rushed to Youtube and Twitter to respond to the groundswell of negative publicity, they will now most likely follow the example of many other brands burned by social media. They were forced to jump into the social media arena in the midst of a crisis and had to sustain their social media presence, long after the immediate ruckus had subsided.

This will undoubtedly be Domino’s’ strategy as well going forward, to progressively regain the confidence of their followers and build up their web presence in each social media channel of the Conversation Prism in order to better respond to the next Big One.

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