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This week two thoughtless employees of a North Carolina Domino’s Pizza franchise posted YouTube videos of them goofing around with the food and then appearing to serve it to customers. Although this was supposed to be a joke, the videos took off online and were seen by up to a million grossed-out people. What would you do if your business experienced a catastrophic public event, whether it is a viral video, reports of a human finger in your food, or lead-based paint on your children’s toys?

It is important for companies to deal with emergencies quickly and intelligently. Here is one site that is fairly comprehensive in damage control planning — except for major oversight: There is no attorney on the crisis management team.

When you call in human resources and upper management, it is imperative that you call your attorneys. A proper investigation of the facts needs to be conducted, preserving evidence, employee confidences, and the privacy and reputations of those involved. It is important to find out the truth of allegations, whether the underlying situation be sexual harassment, product tampering or poor product performance.

You will compound your problems a thousand-fold if you publicly blame a fiasco on an employee who later turned out to be completely innocent or to spend a lot of money denying product liability claims, only to have a private testing service release videos showing your product spontaneously combusting.

The PR team (often along with the attorneys to make sure no greater harm is done) will craft public statements, press releases, appearances by key company personnel, but the attorneys will help determine the proper legal response, including terminating an employee, filing criminal charges, bringing a civil suit for defamation, or sending a cease and desist letter. Often, as is the situation with the Domino’s case, these actions are taken simultaneously.

In addition to addressing the public relations aspects of a crisis, the company may well need to address internal culture, or lack of policies/training. For example, it is being debated whether a social media policy would have prevented the Domino’s fiasco. Others are calling for a new food safety czar at Domino’s. Personally, I think both of these responses are inappropriate in this case, but these are the right questions to ask.

Other things that I think may help prevent the crisis:

• Treat your employees well and create a positive corporate culture. This may inspire loyalty to your business and mission, and will hopefully translate into better customer service, less whistle-blowing and less chance of getting hit by a runaway PR freight train. Remember, your brand is going to be represented to most customers by the lowliest employees. How they feel about their jobs and the company will be broadcast to the customer. Happy employees are more productive and offer better customer service.
• Don’t just have corporate policies, but train employees and enforce them. Having one and not following it is worse than not having one.

Tags: attorney, crisis management, damage control, Domino's, Domino's video, HR, human resources, investigation, public relations, YouTube

This entry was posted on Friday, April 17th, 2009 at 2:15 pm and is filed under business law, Consumer Law, social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.