How Domino's responded to prank video

The saga of the prank Domino's video could be a case study of how fast-moving social media can both giveth and taketh away.

It began April 13, when five YouTube clips showing a Domino's Pizza employee performing unsavory acts with food began spreading on the video-sharing site.

One clip shows a male worker, identified in the amateur video only as Michael, sticking cheese up his nose and adding it to a sandwich. In another, Michael sneezes into a cheese steak sandwich "to be served to some unlucky customer that's in need of some snot," said the video's shooter and narrator, who identified herself as Kristy. In a third, Michael rubs himself with a sponge, then uses it to clean a pan.

Predictably, the vast YouTube community was revulsed, yet watched anyway. Within a day, the clips had been viewed about 200,000 times, while anti-Domino's comments began to spread on Twitter and other social media sources.

The videos were reposted on other sites, including Good-AsYou.org, a gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender activist site in New York. The site's founder, Jeremy Hooper, sent an e-mail to Tim McIntyre, vice president of communications for the Ann Arbor, Mich., pizza chain.

"He said you need to see this," McIntyre said. "Thirty minutes later, our internal social marketing team saw it and reached out to YouTube to take it down."

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Not easy to remove

That proved to be complicated because YouTube first needed the approval of the person who originally posted the video, Kristy.

At 10 p.m., McIntyre received another e-mail, this time from people who saw the video on Consumerist.com, a site published by a subsidiary of the consumer-advocacy group that also publishes Consumer Reports magazine.

According to Ad Age magazine, Georgetown University student Amy Wilson and her boyfriend Jonathan Drake saw that a Jack in the Box sign was briefly visible in one clip. They used Google satellite images to find locations where a Domino's was near a Jack in the Box.

Meanwhile, Paris Miller, a computer consultant from Northern Kentucky, used information from the video post to trace one of Kristy's friends to Conover, N.C., where there is a Domino's across the street from a Jack in the Box.

About three hours after McIntyre received that news, another e-mail came - from Kristy Hammonds, the woman who shot and posted the video.

"I am soo sorry!" the e-mail read. McIntyre said she knew she had been identified.

Domino's notified Conover police and the local health department that morning. Hammonds, 31, and Michael Setzer, 32, who have claimed the video was a prank and that no tainted food ever left the store, were charged with felony food tampering. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is investigating for possible federal charges, McIntyre said.

Domino's shut the store until crews could sanitize the operation. Hammonds and Setzer were fired.

At that point, Domino's officials wrestled with how to deal with the looming damage to the company's reputation. Media and marketing pundits have criticized Domino's for remaining silent and not issuing an immediate response.

But McIntyre said the video had about 250,000 views - sizable, but still only a small segment of the general population. Executives worried that an official company response might cause more people to view the clips.

"The idea that we were trying to ignore it was false, but do you really need to put out a candle with a fire hose?" McIntyre said. Officials instead used their private Twitter accounts and other social media tactics to answer some of the chatter about the incident and eventually activated a Domino's Twitter account two weeks earlier than planned.

But by April 15, with the number of views soaring to nearly 1 million, the chain decided to shoot a video apology from Domino's USA President Patrick Doyle. And instead of alerting the general news media, Domino's posted it where the whole thing started - on YouTube.

"We had been fighting fire with water," McIntyre said. "Now we needed to fight the fire with fire."

Reactions to apology

The two-minute apology, which critics have called "wooden," did open the floodgates. Online chatter about the videos skyrocketed and Domino's was searched more that day than Paris Hilton, McIntyre said.

On April 16, local and national newspapers and broadcast outlets began calling to get the story and were replayed portions of the original video, causing more people to view them.

The original videos, now taken down by YouTube but still available elsewhere, have been viewed about 2 million times, while the Domino's response has been viewed 650,000 times.

But the buzz about the videos has subsided and by last week, customers were speaking more positively about the chain, which McIntyre said was due to the company reaching out directly to social networks.

"Are we on the mend? It's too early to tell," McIntyre said. "Would we do it again? Yes. It helped us get the word out. While it did expose more people to the issue, it also said Domino's Pizza is taking this very seriously and that the thing we hold dearest is our customer's trust."