Three signs that video storytelling has become the topic du jour in the marketing and PR world:
I’m blogging about it, and I am usually the next to last person to spot a trend.
Nearly all the seminar/webinar/conference invitations I get these days have a come-on like “harnessing the power of online video…”
The Dark Forces have glommed on to video, and they are usually the first to spot a trend.
Two Domino’s pizza workers found a whole new way to gross out more than 1 million people and get fired — all by harnessing the power of online video. Their YouTube bit involved mucous and cheese and went viral via Facebook and Twitter. The Domino’s legal folks have succeeded in deep-sixing the video, but the PR team admits it reacted too slowly to the viral crisis. Their vain hope was that the nasty affair would be confined to the Twitter fringe, but that is a pretty significant slice of humanity that also includes the mainstream media. And journalists don’t get many chances to write about boogers.
To the PR folks’ credit, they fought fire with fire, putting their president, Patrick Doyle, in front of the camera (and poorly placed teleprompter) and posting a heartfelt apology on their already-established YouTube channel. Unfortunately, they had not yet established their own Twitter profile and fell behind in that lightning-quick medium.
Using video storytelling to build an organization’s reputation is challenging enough; now we have to think about protecting ourselves against malicious video stories. The Domino’s video response had its flaws, but it was up quickly and I think Doyle came across as authentic and sincere. The Doyle video has had more than 600,000 views, compared to the more than a million views of the gross-out video. Train wrecks will atract more crowds than cleanup operations.
My bet is that Domino’s has a big enough reservoir of goodwill to weather this prank. But it had to draw significantly from that well because of the power of visual storytelling.
A slimed pizza is worth more than 1,000 words
Three signs that video storytelling has become the topic du jour in the marketing and PR world:
I’m blogging about it, and I am usually the next to last person to spot a trend.
Nearly all the seminar/webinar/conference invitations I get these days have a come-on like “harnessing the power of online video…”
The Dark Forces have glommed on to video, and they are usually the first to spot a trend.
Two Domino’s pizza workers found a whole new way to gross out more than 1 million people and get fired — all by harnessing the power of online video. Their YouTube bit involved mucous and cheese and went viral via Facebook and Twitter. The Domino’s legal folks have succeeded in deep-sixing the video, but the PR team admits it reacted too slowly to the viral crisis. Their vain hope was that the nasty affair would be confined to the Twitter fringe, but that is a pretty significant slice of humanity that also includes the mainstream media. And journalists don’t get many chances to write about boogers.
To the PR folks’ credit, they fought fire with fire, putting their president, Patrick Doyle, in front of the camera (and poorly placed teleprompter) and posting a heartfelt apology on their already-established YouTube channel. Unfortunately, they had not yet established their own Twitter profile and fell behind in that lightning-quick medium.
Using video storytelling to build an organization’s reputation is challenging enough; now we have to think about protecting ourselves against malicious video stories. The Domino’s video response had its flaws, but it was up quickly and I think Doyle came across as authentic and sincere. The Doyle video has had more than 600,000 views, compared to the more than a million views of the gross-out video. Train wrecks will atract more crowds than cleanup operations.
My bet is that Domino’s has a big enough reservoir of goodwill to weather this prank. But it had to draw significantly from that well because of the power of visual storytelling.