If you hadn’t heard about the social media blunder Domino’s Pizza faced last month- we’ll give you a brief re-cap of how this YouTube video has made a glaring example of the effects of social on your brand, company, or products. If you’re not keeping up with social media, your marketing is going to be as effective as posting yard sale flyers on neighborhood street posts.
The population of social-media users — who now outnumber e-mail users — has increased 87% since 2003, Nielsen Co. reports. Further, in the past year, the time spent on social networks increased 73 percent! Seems coffee and lunch breaks are now being used to consume the internet’s daily feed of media. Using social networks, blogs, videos, etc. (whatever kind of new media strikes your fancy) can help to solidify your brand’s message, or explain directly to consumers what your products are for, or even allow you to step up your customer service a notch or two. There are so may ways to use social media, the possibilities are endless. If you’re doubting right now that you’d possibly be able to reach your target consumer, generate buzz, or strike up some direct dialogue with customers? Think again.
Enter Domino’s Pizza- A perfect example to demonstrate the reach and effects (both negative or positive) that one little piece of social media can have on a company. Two Domino’s employees made a gross prank video in one of the chains, triggering a YouTube sensation, and a taking big hit in Domino’s sales. Domino’s in turn fired back with their own video, capitalizing on the ability to response directly to the same group of consumers who were hit by the first video (also in turn, firing the two employees).
Its a great example of having the power to not only see, but also to monitor what people are saying about you… and more importantly, have the ability to change peoples minds! You can check out people’s tweets with twitter search.
You can also use search on Facebook through Lexicon, which actually graphs the trends of whatever keywords you search! How neat is that?
Lastly, you can simply Google your company, your products, or yourself, and see what sites people are chatting about you on. This marketing strategy can be more effective than traditional press or a fancy ad campaign (and much, much cheaper!). So figure out some clever ways to get in the social media mix! And remember, as they say in Hollywood, any press is good press! (who would’ve thought I’d be blogging about domino’s pizza this afternoon 
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Tags: domino's YouTube, Dominos pizza, Free Commerce, generate social media buzz, lexicon, lexicon facebook search, lexicon graphs, Nielsen Co. reports, peoples tweets, search facebook, Shopit, social media, target customers, twitter search