YouTube crisis management

Unless you've been sleeping under a rock, you should know about the Domino's incident that happened this week. In case you don't know here's one of about 100 videos on YouTube describing the incident:

What's interesting about this is that, in addition to firing the employees, Dominos had the video pulled from YouTube and posted this response:

I think it's a great idea to use the media to respond to the crisis but I'm not sure if I agree with them removing the video and with the format of the video response.

Pulling the video only allows others to re-post it more rapidly. It's a little like itching a rash caused by poison ivy. It spreads when scratched. If you really want to see the video, its now REALLY easy to find multiple places where its posted on YouTube.

The video response from the CEO is a little staged. It's not hard to tell he's ready a script off camera. There's also no information on cleanliness standards, number of restaurants and what they're going to do to prevent this in the future outside of "looking at their standards".

Truthfully I'm not sure there is much that can be done to keep this from happening. Truth be known, I'm sure it's happening at fast food places all the time, although I doubt it's too common. The response to me, though, gets a C. Yeah, they used social media tactics but there's no real thinking behind it.

- Paul Herring

UPDATE

Take a look at this apology from JetBlue from some time ago:

He even went on David Letterman to apologize. I think this is a much better model for how to handle a crisis that doesn't use social media just as a quick tactic but integrated into the plan. Thanks to Scott Monty for the Tweet!