Domino’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:

negative-dominos-feedback

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:

edited-dominos-feedback

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:

dominos-search

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.