Business gets buzz online 

In early April, two employees of a Domino’s Pizza in North Carolina filmed themselves preparing food with mozzarella that had been stuck up their noses. They also sneezed on toppings and washed dishes with sponges that had been in contact with – shall we say – “unsanitary” parts of their bodies.

It was all a joke, but the footage made its way onto the video sharing site YouTube and, when it hit the massive micro-blogging site Twitter, it went from prank to PR nightmare within a few days. The video had gone viral and, like a disease, it weakened Domino’s brand.

The fiasco is a potent example of the perils and promise of doing business in a hyper-connected world, said Boise social media guru Tac Anderson. On one hand, social media gives businesses a powerful way to interact with customers. On the other, it has the potential to ruin your business’ reputation overnight. It’s all in how you use it.

“The very first thing you always start with is: What are the company’s goals? What are they trying to do? Who are they trying to reach? Then you look at which tools are appropriate,” he said.

Domino’s execs did exactly the wrong thing in handling their social media meltdown, Anderson wrote on his blog, NewCommBiz.com. They hunkered down, buttoned up and banked on the Web’s notoriously short attention span. They should have gotten out in front of it online, especially on Twitter.

Twitter is the social media site that everyone’s talking about (or “tweeting” about, in Twitter parlance). With an estimated 4 million users and growing rapidly, the three-year-old Web site gives users the ability to write messages up to 140 characters long and transmit (“tweet”) them to “followers,” which are other users who subscribe to their stream of tweets.  

Essentially a 24-hour water cooler conversation among millions of people, businesses are scrambling to figure out how it can be used to their advantage. But the pitfalls – as typified by the Domino’s kitchen prank – are daunting.

“The same things that can happen in blogs a few years ago – the kind of storms that could get kicked up and the discontent that can happen – can happen instantaneously now on Twitter,” Anderson said in an interview. “Probably what’s had the most impact is: A., in that instantaneous status update of Twitter; and B., it’s brought a lot more people into social media.”

Anderson’s second point alone means businesses should be taking note of what’s happening in cyberspace – they’re a part of it, even if they don’t know it.

“Here’s the gist: These conversations are going on whether you participate in them or not,” said Brian Critchfield, chief navel gazer at Navel Marketing, a Boise company that specializes in social media marketing. “If somebody’s talking behind your back, wouldn’t you rather be a part of that conversation and able to influence it maybe?”

The unbearable lightness of Tweeting

Having a stake in the conversations your customers are having sounds like a good enough reason to get your business tweeting, but there’s still the Domino’s Effect: Where’s the control? What happens if one of your employees goes off-the-cuff and ends up making your brand a laughingstock?

Jen Harris, a social media evangelist and Twitter expert at Boise-based Consilio Business Managers, said the key to understanding Twitter’s use for business is actually giving up some control.

“Even before Twitter I’ve been hearing the ‘what ifs’ and ‘where’s the control?’ But that’s not what social media’s about. … It’s being part of a conversation,” she said over coffee with the Idaho Business Review. “That’s where that fear is, it’s a line of communication direct to the customer.”

Opening yourself to both the good and the bad is a high hurdle to overcome, but the rewards far outweigh the risks, said Lindsay Dofelmier, who owns the realty firm Urban Agent Team, with an office in Boise. She’s an active Twitterer and said transparency, honesty and personality are what drive business today.

“The biggest thing I would say is that we have become more transparent as individuals because of Twitter,” she said. “When people meet us in real life, they feel like they already know us.”

Dofelmier encourages everyone on her team to use Twitter, and puts no restrictions on what they say. It’s a calculated risk, but that’s why it’s valuable, she said.

“We want them to tweet regularly, some tweet more than others, but we specifically tell them, ‘We’re not going to be mad at anything you say. In fact, make fun of us if you want to,’” she said. “We encourage anything and everything that’s going to get people more followers.”

So far it’s worked out. Dofelmier said her firm has closed three deals off Twitter, gotten one listing, connected with three current buyers and made more than $25,000 in commission. Not bad in the midst of one of the worst housing downturns in recent history.

“People do business with people they like. We’ve all known that forever. The difficult thing is: How do you build your sphere of influence?” she said. “Now (with Twitter) you can do it in an accelerated timeframe.”

A value proposition

Around the same time that Domino’s was providing a counter-example of how to use social media, Colorado-based Qwest Communications kicked off a Twitter-based customer service program that looks more like social media done right.

The companywide Twitter initiative is being run from the firm’s downtown Boise call center, and gives customer service reps the ability to solve problems quickly while building a little goodwill along the way.

“Right now, especially with the economic climate as it is, people are a little more on edge,” said Josh Sippola, a 20-something from Idaho Falls who is leading Qwest’s social media effort. “They’ll Tweet their frustration, and this provides an outlet that’s more immediate, more personable. … It lets us be a part of the conversation.”

“People have pain and the companies that will win at social media are the companies that are listening,” Harris said. “It’s an avenue for corporations to find me. I want to be found, but only when I’m ready to be found. That’s the way that companies should use it.”

The way they shouldn’t use it, she added, is as a new way to spew traditional corporate information at potential customers.

“You can’t take the old stuff you were doing and apply it to the new stuff,” she said. “You’ve got to be true, you have to talk to people, you have to be honest. …You have to have this whole balance of giving and receiving information.”

In other words, nobody wants your press release, or a boilerplate announcement about a sale, or even the digital version of: “Hi, my name is _____. Here’s my business card,” Dofelmier said.

“I started using Twitter so I didn’t have to go to chamber events and deal with people who were wearing their business masks,” she said. “They don’t understand that it’s about being authentic and putting yourself out there, taking a risk. … If you’re not going to be authentic then don’t use it, because it’s not the medium for you.”

But how much au
thenticity is too much? Critchfield said the rules of engagement in the Twitterverse are similar to those we use in everyday life.

“Just use cocktail party rules. But even cocktail parties have that drunk guy who’s butting into people’s conversations and being obnoxious,” he said. “The same rules apply in social media.”

Beyond that, Critchfield added: “Have a cause, don’t just chat to chat… (and) be honest and transparent. Don’t spin, don’t lie.”

Still, getting everyone to follow the same etiquette is a challenge. Anderson said training is key.

“What would have happened if all Domino’s employees had, along with their OSHA training, received a half an hour of social media training?” he said, adding that few if any companies are even thinking about it.

“Best case scenario, they’re training their communications people. Maybe some of their PR people, maybe HR people; but they’re not pushing out to the broader population in-company,” he said. “Companies still have this siloed thinking that company communication only comes from the communications people. That’s just not the case anymore. … The Internet is not a back-channel. We’ve reached the point where whatever’s happening offline is also happening online. …

“These are communities more than anything else,” he added. “Any community that a company engages with, they should be trying to add value to it. Where companies get in trouble is that they go into a situation and they try to extract more value than they put in.”

Protecting yourself in the Twitterverse

Taking social media seriously is also important from a legal point of view, said Boise attorney Stephen Nipper, with Dykas, Shaver & Nipper. Company secrets can be exposed, libel can be spread and brands – even identities – can be appropriated by others.

“It’s always going to be an issue and the issues are going to be the same ones that popped up with respect to using e-mail, the same ones that popped up with respect to blogging,” said Nipper, who has written The Invent Blog for the past five years and is a Twitter user. “There’s always a threat that there’s going to be disclosure of company secrets.”

He said taking someone to court over what’s said on Twitter, or any other social media site, could be tricky given the free speech nature of the Web. What may be an even greater threat, he said, is making sure you own your brand name on social media sites, especially Twitter.

“If you’re Delta Airlines you’d love to have Delta.com. If you’re Delta Faucets, you’d love to have Delta.com. If you’re Delta Dental, you’d love to have Delta.com, and on and on,” he said.

“It’s just good for businesses to recognize that their trademarks are something they should seriously consider registering … not just so they can use them down the road but so no one else can,” he said.

Can Twitter make or break a business?

Based on demographics alone, Twitter – and other social media – is here to stay. Recent studies have shown that the largest new converts to Facebook are women in their mid-50s. Anderson said Twitter has always appealed to the thirtysomething professional crowd, and a whole new crop of workers will soon enter the job markets who’ve never known a world without e-mail, IM or text messaging.

The tools and the technology have and will continue to evolve, but, as Critchfield said: “Social media will become, just as e-mail has become, an integral part of how we do business.”

How we do business with social media will require some generational finesse and a clear understanding of what we’re trying to accomplish with the technology.

“The younger generation is much more open,” Critchfield said. “They’re kind of like, ‘open the kimono.’ The older generation is more reserved. … It’s just finding the balance, and I think that’s where you rein in your younger generation and encourage your older generation to open up a little, chat.”

If companies embrace social media like Twitter, and really understand what they’re trying to do with it, they’ll build relationships with a range of customers that would have been impossible even five years ago, Harris said.

“How many companies were like, ‘We can’t have the Internet, that’s a waste of time.’ ‘We can’t have e-mail, that’s a waste of time?’” she said. “It’s a new tool that companies need to adapt to. …

“It’s a relationship management opportunity. It’s putting yourself out there. You might as well go in and try to change people’s perspectives,” she added. “I think it’ll help make a business. Will it help break a business? If you’re bad at what you do and you have a bad product it’s going to accelerate the amount of time it takes you to fail.”

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