Denny’s Twitter experiment: massive fail
Denny’s restaurant chain has made a foray into the world of social networking, with Twitter as a centerpiece into its excursion into the brave new world internet presence. The result, because of a typo, is FAIL.
A section on the back of the 24-hour restaurant’s menu invite you to “Join the conversation!” in a self-advertisement which features Twitter, Facebook, and an email list. That is all right as far as it goes; it has become de rigeur for every business everywhere to have some sort of a social media presence. The problem comes in when you allow a typo to creep into the latest printing of your menu, with the result that people looking for your Twitter account find instead a fellow names dennys from Taiwan instead of your restaurant chain, according to a CNET story. That is exacerbated when you don’t fix it.
For Denny’s part, they are a major corporation and therefore mindset-genetically unable to admit that they made a mistake. Alan Miller is the co-owner of Filter Creative Group, the company which manages Denny’s social-media initiatives. Miller says that it was a simple misprint and that neither the menu nor the social media campaign was marred by having the wrong account name printed on all those thousands of menus. And Denny’s vice president for sales and field marketing, says, “We are working with Twitter right now, and we will have that (account) shortly. It has gone inactive [and] we’ll have that back momentarily. It’s just a matter of having that worked out. [Twitter has] essentially told us it’s our domain.”
Evidently, the fact that Denny’s has done little (if anything) to fix the problem, which is of months duration rather than days speaks for itself. They could have printed stickers with the right information to cover up the wrong information for a few hundred dollars, but they didn’t bother, exhibiting their commitment to social networking representation in a way that mere words cannot. Instead, they chose to do nothing useful, then provide plenty of spin. Sorry, Denny’s: FAIL.
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February 20th, 2010
For some reason, big corporate time might be in reverse warp speed. I have seen dead animals respond faster. :)
But if you look at what happened with Coke when they they changed to ” New Coke” or more recently when a new design change on their Website covered up a full 1/3rd of their logo for 6 weeks or so.
Heck I even emailed and called them and their PR firm just for grins and they said is was like that on purpose and part of the desing..LOL it was changed about 2 weeks later.
And now you have Domino’s pizza with their new pizza. They are making the same mistake that Coke did in they did not add the new, they got rid of the old and I hear they might bring back the old.
The good thing about it is that it gives the small Entrepreneurs the ability to kick the big boys butts.
But to be fair, not all big companies are like that but there sure are a lot of them.
Cheers,
Andrew Anderson
21to21.com
Marketing Observer :)