Domino’s Pizza’s new Pizza Turnaround campaign set off a wave of discussions in the social media world. The Pizza Turnaround video, which was produced by Domino’s, features Domino’s employees, including its head chefs, and some of the company’s marketing executives, admitting outright that the pizza sucks. Some of the quotes in the video include “Domino’s pizza crust is to me like cardboard,” a sentiment expressed in a focus group but echoed by Domino’s executives. “Doesn’t feel like there’s much love in Domino’s Pizza,” says another focus group participant.
This is, to be sure, a bold move, and many are applauding Domino’s for publicly owning up to making bad pizza. Everyone’s talking about transparency, but not many companies are really doing anything about it.
There’s a reason for that, of course. Only an idiot is 100% transparent.
Setting aside literal definitions, what does “transparent” mean? For publicly held companies, “transparent” has come to mean conducting business and doing accounting according to GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles). Every company is supposed to report its financial situation using the same measures as every other company, and using the same measures every quarter, to ensure that shareholders and regulators can read them and make valid judgments and comparisons.
In the social media world, transparency extends beyond finance, meaning something like “using social media to expose to the public the inner workings of the company and the candid thoughts of its executives and employees.”
So where does the publicly held company draw the line? The CEO can’t be 100% transparent on his or her blog. Comments about the company’s finances are regulated by FASB and the SEC. Comparisons to competitors are regulated by the FTC. When, what information, and in what format an officer of a publicly held company can disclose information is all strictly regulated.
One could argue in fact that Domino’s admission that its pizza isn’t up to par is contrary to its obligations to shareholders to maximize value. In fact, Domino’s stock traded around $11.39 today, not far from its 52-week high, and nearly triple its 52-week low of $4.76. So how bad can the pizza be?
Maybe we expect too much transparency from the companies we do business with. How transparent are you? Do you tell everybody everything you are doing and thinking, or are there some things you might omit? If you want to be 100% transparent, you would have to walk down the street saying out loud, “That’s an ugly shirt.” “You look so cool with your Bluetooth.” “Your girlfriend is way too hot for you.” We wouldn’t call that transparency, actually, we’d call it Tourette Syndrome.
Why then do we expect the companies we do business with to overexpose themselves? I think the social media “movement” has pressured companies to act irresponsibly. OK, the Domino’s thing is clever and is attracting a lot of attention. And maybe Domino’s feels it’s “working.” But I think these guys are subjecting themselves to an unnecessary beating. The following (with one letter masked) was displayed by Domino’s on its Pizza Turnaround site:
When counseling clients on blog commenting policies, and the use of RSS feeds and Twitter feeds on their corporate sites, I remind them that they still own that real estate, and while they can’t control what people are saying about them out in the blogosphere, they can control their own Web sites. For example, no public company should permit racism, gratuitous obscenity, out-of-control bashing of the company or its competitors, etc.
I used to argue that companies should not surrender their brand to consumers, but should share it. Some things require careful branding and messaging, some things should be more open and participatory and a lot of things are simply beyond the company’s control. Domino’s has raised the stakes by inviting consumers to trash talk the company and its pizza. I wonder what’s next?
Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz is unquestionably one of the best, and first, CEO bloggers in the world. He’s not only a pioneer, but an intelligent, articulate, engaging writer who sets a difficult standard for others to match. I was writing a column on CEO blogging this afternoon and noticed that Jonathan’s blog has not been updated since May 18 of this year.
As Jonathan writes on the blog, in the May 18 post:
“I recognize it’s been a while since I’ve posted a blog. For reasons why, just click here to read the background. And before you ask, SEC regulations and securities laws limit what I can discuss about the Oracle transaction, so don’t expect any insights on the topic.”
Oracle announced its intention to acquire Sun on April 20. Whenever companies are in this mode, strict SEC regulations govern all communications material to the deal, so silence is sometimes the best policy. It’s interesting that Jonathan was still active nearly a month after the announcement. Sun’s Twitter account linked to the blog was tweeting six-month old blog posts up until October 15.
I look forward to seeing Jonathan, one of the industry’s unique voices, blogging again.
Full Disclosure: I worked for Sun Microsystems for five years and knew Jonathan. I am a huge fan of the company.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Joanne Kisling and a group of Sun people this morning about my book SocialCorp. Joanne asked me about the barriers to corporate social media adoption and how communicators can help overcome resistance from company gatekeepers. Give it a listen over on Sun.com or download the MP3!
In my book, SocialCorp, I identify what I think are the Six Valuable Attributes that make social media a powerful tool in a corporate communications. These are:
Authenticity – Social media lets the real voices of real people come through, allowing an intimacy never achieved before in corporate communications.
Transparency – There are two kinds of transparency in corporate social media. The first is traditional financial transparency, the ability for shareholders and regulators to see how well a company is performing financially. The second definition, closely related, is that through company blogs, communities and other vehicles, the rest of a company’s inner workings can also be made visible to the public.
Immediacy – Immediacy is the ability of companies, bloggers, journalists and members of the public to communicate, and to engage in online conversations at unprecedented speed. A blog post can be written, formatted and published in minutes. Twitter updates happen in the blink of an eye. Live video is now within reach of anyone with a handicam, or even a cell phone with a video camera.
Participation – Once the domain of company authorized communicators, a useful, current definition of corporate communications recognizes that anyone can participate in the conversation, whether on the company’s blog, independent forums, personal blogs, Twitter, Slashdot, or any of a thousand places online.
Connectedness – Through a multitude of mechanisms for sharing information, social media allows millions of connections to take place, amplifying the impact of company communications. RSS feeds allow information posted in one place to be instantly displayed in thousand of other places. Social bookmarking sites like Digg allow users to easily share stories with others.
Accountability – While one of the characteristics of the Internet is supposedly anonymity, and this is true in some cases, people who use social media are more accountable than they might realize. Many companies, and their PR and marketing agencies, have tried to “game the system” through unethical practices like astroturfing, the practice of falsifying grassroots support for a product, company, service or point of view by having paid company representatives leave anonymous comments. Over and over again, these companies are caught and publicly vilified. Seemingly anonymous postings leave a trail of IP addresses and other clues that are detected and publicized by vigilant users.
I’m really happy that I’ve started work for Intridea, an amazing company doing some great work in enterprise social media. Yoshi Maisami, one of the founders of Intridea, and I started chatting over the holidays. I met with Yoshi, Barg, David, Chris, and many other folks from Intridea in D.C. in December and was impressed by their enthusiasm, and by their exceptional corporate culture.
My title is Chief Enterprise Social Business Strategist. I know it’s a little long (it runs to two lines on our business cards), but we thought it was important to define what I actually do, which is similar to what I have been doing since January 2007, advising large companies and organizations on how to use social media in a way that helps them achieve their communications and business objectives. That’s the basic premise of my book, SocialCorp, and we’ll be applying the SocialCorp philosophy to the work I do at Intridea.
Intridea is deep in social app development and has a team of more than 20 fulltime Rails developers, many of whom were involved in developing the IP behind some of social media’s biggest names. The company has a suite of behind-the-firewall enterprise grade social business apps like microblogging platform Present.ly, the SocialSpring Social Network Platform and the Crowdsound User Feedback Widget.
As a Twitter addict, I’m really excited about Present.ly, which is the official microblogging tool for this year’s SXSW, and we’re pretty proud of that. (More on that soon.) Present.ly isn’t really a competitor to Twitter, but behaves similarly (and features file transfer and other functions Twitter doesn’t have). We use Present.ly internally at Intridea, which was just one more thing that confirmed for me that these guys really get it.
The focus here on my blog will change a little, but I’ll try to be relevant, self-aware and insightful, and I’ll keep the Intridea hype to a minimum, but I really do like the company or I wouldn’t have joined.
Tags: 
