The Sting of Real-Time Product Feedback
Dec 30, 2009 by Rebecca Kelley | Reputation Management, TwitterDomino’s Pizza recently underwent a product overhaul after their pizza was ranked among the worst in a taste test (tied with Chuck E. Cheese — ouch). Their new recipe boasts a new garlic crust, 100% mozzarella cheese with a hint of provolone, and a “sauce that’s boss.” The company even set up a micro-site called PizzaTurnaround.com that showcases a blog about the new pizza, a “documentary,” and a Twitter stream along the right sidebar that displays customer feedback.
Okay, maybe that last part wasn’t such a good idea. Someone took a screenshot of the tweets that filtered in, and they weren’t all sunshiney praises about the great new recipe:
Victor’s written before about porn account avatars showing up in our site’s Twitter stream. It’s the main problem with displaying your mentions in a widget on your site — you can’t control what comes in. The Domino’s Twitter stream showcases this beautifully — some tweets just may be negative. While some of the tweets are positive, others aren’t painting the new pizza recipe in the most favorable light. But hey, that’s the trade-off of social media, right? Once you open up the lines of communication and create a two-way dialog, you lose a bit of control over what’s being said about your brand.
How did Domino’s handle the feedback? Well, see for yourself:
Hmmm, there seems to be a suspiciously high amount of positive comments about the #newpizza. What happened to the negative remarks? Did the feedback turn good on its own? Are people just coming around on the new recipe?
Not really. It seems as if Domino’s is starting to hand-pick the good tweets and weed out the bad ones. Check out search results for the hashtag #newpizza:
If you compare the real-time search results to the Twitter stream displayed on Domino’s micro-site, you’ll notice that a couple tweets are missing. The first one is from a woman who said that her friends started “projectile vomiting” upon trying the new pizza, while the second one calls Domino’s out for their “twitter feed failure” — presumably this user has also noticed the missing negative tweets.
This isn’t the best way to handle negative feedback, especially on the Internet. You can’t just delete a comment, alter a post or remove some tweets and think they’re gone for good and that nobody will notice (especially when, in Domino’s case, you can easily compare their stream to Twitter’s search tool). Encouraging real feedback from your users and then editing out the feedback you don’t like is a pretty strong indication that you’re not taking the feedback seriously.* You can’t run your company on the basis that everyone must love and agree with your product 100% of the time — that’s a recipe for failure (even if the sauce is boss).
In Domino’s case, they tried to have their garlic crusty pizza and eat it too. If you decide to get into social media and market your business and products on social networks, you have to acknowledge and accept the fact that you won’t be able to control what people say about you. If you can’t take the heat, you need to step away from the wood-fired pizza brick oven, so to speak. If Domino’s didn’t want to showcase negative comments about their new recipe, they shouldn’t have displayed the Twitter stream in the first place. You can’t just dive into the next big marketing trend and refuse to play by the trend’s rules. That’s not how social media works, and Domino’s showcased this pretty handily.
Postscript: Upon reading Tamar’s comment below, I agree that it was presumptuous of me to think that Domino’s isn’t taking the negative remarks seriously or considering them as feedback just because they’re filtering them out — that’s a mistake on my part. I also didn’t consider the fact that some content may be removed if it’s profane or offensive to users. However, there are still some tweets which don’t fall into either category that are being removed, and I think that’s a tactic they should reconsider.
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22 Responses to “The Sting of Real-Time Product Feedback”
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Unfortunately you're making assumptions and jumping to a faulty conclusion without knowing how the technology works. I can assure you none of the tweets are hand-picked.
Do you work for Domino's or work on the campaign? I'm sure people would love some clarification.
Agreed, there are some assumptions being made. But as someone who noticed the same thing, hopefully you can shed a bit of light on how the technology does work.
If you do happen to work on the Domino's campaign, I'd be curious to hear why it is that the feed is now magically filtering out negative responses. I know I've checked back several times throughout the day and the results presented from Twitter are dramatically different from what's making it through to PizzaTurnaround.com.
Yes, it's still an assumption that Domino's is picking and choosing results, but you have to admit there's some pretty dramatic evidence to back it up.
I don't blame Domino's to deleting some, and I stress some comments. There are numerous tweeters that just use the feed for vulgar fun. Domino's is a family friendly organization any comments that would get you kicked out the restaurant should get be removed from their website. I don't need is my 9 year old to start talking about projectile vomiting and heaven forbid he ask me how to pronounce "cyberphucker" 's screen name.
What about the "twitter feed failure" comment that seems to have disappeared? It's not offensive, and yet it's somehow gone.
A little transparency here would be useful, and it's a big part of what social media is about. I was actually coming to this post to disagree with Rebecca but now I'm a little bit torn about whether I should.
So now that I responded to Anon who makes me scratch my head, I'm going to respond to one of your own comments, Becs.
"Encouraging real feedback from your users and then editing out the feedback you don’t like is a pretty strong indication that you’re not taking the feedback seriously. "
I'm not sure that's really the case here and I think you're being pretty hard on Domino's given that I think they did it this way to avoid a Skittles #fail. There are two issues at hand:
1. Getting feedback to process internally. If the tweets are hand picked (which I'd prefer, and I'll go into why in #2), it's good that someone is there to read them so that s/he can provide feedback to the people responsible. Just because they are weeding out the offensive tweets does not mean that they are not interested in taking the feedback to heart.
2. It's an issue of public perception and what's appropriate for the Domino's brand. Twitter is uncensored; you can see all tweets you want if you go to twitter.com. But why should the Domino's brand prominently feature negative sentiment on their own web property? Recall, again, the Skittles #fail. That was a mess (though maybe Domino's listened to Michael). On the Domino's site, they have a choice to filter out the negative tweets because of the medium.
On the other hand, if Domino's had a blog post and people wrote negative criticisms (valuable ones with actionable information, not just "omg this food sucks"), I'd agree with you. However, in the context of Tweets, I don't think filtering out the conversation is bad for Domino's at all. If someone wants a clearer picture, they can search for #newpizza on Twitter. Domino's used the Twitter medium knowing that there will still be some negative sentiment expressed.
I hope you see what I'm saying. It's hard to provide valuable actionable feedback in a 140-character tweet, so I understand that filtering out "this is projectile vomiting food" (which would be visible on dominos.com for all to see) makes sense to me.
I agree that cursing and mindless trolling just to get a laugh should be removed. People of all ages go to the site and as a giant corporation you don't want to offend anyone or have children seeing these messages. But if someone writes a legitimate complaint they should post it, after all the whole campaign is based off complaints to make a better product. They ask us as customers to help them make a better pizza. When you go to the website and see page after page of people praising how good it is you create a false since. It's like they are hiding something. When you see a select number of positive feedback mixed with negative you get a simple mindset of some liked it and some didn't. Doesn't mean it was bad because with all food it's either good or not. People have different taste so you will not please everyone. But if someone writes it was too sweat or too much sauce it gives the potential customer an idea of what they are in for. This does not however warrant them to again make more changes because 100 people out of millions who thought it was too sweat. But it keeps them true to their commercial intent of "We want your feedback". Got to take the good with the bad, can't pick one.
"It's like they are hiding something."
Fair point. Full disclosure should be given that some tweets may be filtered..
Then again, though, the "filtered" tweets were mostly positive with some neutral tweets. I think that's fair. If I'm hungry and thinking about food, the last thing I want to read is a tweet on the website for my pizza of choice saying something about "projectile vomiting."
I still disagree that filtering out the tweets from the public eye on Domino's own website indicates that Domino's isn't taking the feedback to heart. They probably are. But the world doesn't need to see "OMG THIS IS GROSS" tweets.
Yeah, contacting dominos would be the next step in a "Story." Great post, though. Most people don't notice things like that (tweets disappearing) and it can have an effect on them…
-kpaul
I agree with you on some points. You're right in that I'm making assumptions that Domino's aren't taking the negative remarks seriously — just because they're removing them doesn't mean they're not keeping them in mind. That being said, there are some comments that aren't offensive or profane that are still being filtered out, and I think genuine criticism and questions should be kept in-tact. They could also include a small disclaimer stating that offensive or profane tweets will be filtered in order to clear up any misconceptions.
To be fair to them, they did indeed publish a bunch of the tweets about this post on http://pizzaturnaround.com (take a look at this screenshot: http://imgur.com/V2zOd).
I also saw a few others on their site that weren't necessarily 'glowing reviews' so they probably aren't censoring everything.
I think it would be a great follow-up post to talk to someone from Domino's about their experiences with this campaign, what they learned from it and also how their social media feedback differed from their own market tests.
Ugh – the link above for the screenshot didn't work. Try this: http://imgur.com/V2zOd
Ugh – the link above for the screenshot didn't work. Try this: http://imgur.com/V2zOd
It does seem like they're doing a better job now — maybe the first batch was a kneejerk reaction? I'll do a follow up post about censoring content based on the discussion sparked from this post.
Check the page source code. The are filtering tweets for "pizza-search-badwords." Happy pizza new year! ~ @AdNys
Haha, one of the more amusing filters I've seen. Thanks for sharing! Happy new year to you too! May 2010 bring you even more toppings.
Good points. I am in agreement with you there.
Sorry to be stupid, but how did you know that was a filter?
In the comment above, Andrew mentioned that he saw a filter set up in the source code.
[...] Content? Jan 5, 2010 by Rebecca Kelley | Content Last week I wrote about the sting of real-time product feedback and how Domino’s appeared to be filtering out some tweets that were being displayed in a feed [...]
Agreed, there are some assumptions being made. But as someone who noticed the same thing, hopefully you can shed a bit of light on how the technology does work