Domino's Pizza Turnaround - a half-baked experiment

As the company admits itself above, Domino's Pizza, once the golden boy of U.S. delivery franchises, has been crowded out of the market. The cynic in me says that is only natural, pizza is, after all, only cheese and tomatoes on quick-fired bread - and there are thousands of companies at it across the USA. But now the folks at Domino's are throwing everything at Pizza Turnaround a new media drive designed to revive the company's fortunes. The site is part blog, website and Twitter aggregator, but like the company's products, fails to get the pulse racing.

Sadly, watching the above ad, which starts off honest and self-critical, but turns into the barf-inducing PR mess you would expect from a company like Domino's, you can't help but think they have got it badly wrong. There is only one thing that can save them, a pizza that knocks the salami off the competition. But a glance at the site's Twitter feed on the site makes depressing reading for Domino's execs. This from @realshawnbrandt:

I think Domino's #newpizza is a downgrade

And he was one of the nicer ones.

However the calzone unfolds (do Domino's do calzone?), it makes for an interesting case study for those companies looking to dip their feet into the new media water. And given that the use of new media extends to using "paid media units" on YouTube, which blog Paid Media says ain't cheap. I can't help thinking Domino's have missed the point of reaching out to customers via new/social media. But in the end, it will probably be the pizza that does the talking.

Will too many cooks spoil the recipe Wiki?

If you had told anyone that Wikipedia would be one of the world's most valuable sources of information ten years ago, they would have first said "what the hell is Wikipedia" before insisting that an encyclopedia edited by ordinary people would never work in practice. How wrong we all were.

People like TechCrunch (it is worth clicking the link just to see who the competition are in the online recipe's sphere) are saying the same thing about Foodista.com, a cooking wiki that aims to distill popular and obscure receipes to create a collaborative cookbook.

Here's the synopsis from the always excellent Springwise:

Launched late last year, Seattle-based Foodista is a collaborative project to build the world's largest, highest-quality cooking encyclopedia. The site says it is the first to organize and cross-link the basic elements of cooking: foods, or the basic ingredients; recipes, or combinations of ingredients; cooking techniques; and kitchen tools. Rather than include hundreds of recipes for the same basic result, however—the way many recipe sites do—Foodista aims instead to perfect a few key recipes through the collaborative editing process. Thousands of high-resolution photos from the Flickr.com Creative Commons currently illustrate the topics on the site—though not the results of specific recipes, as TechCrunch points out—and users can also upload their own photos. Content is fully editable, and a raft of tools aimed at food bloggers include embeddable widgets to forge automated links from Foodista to specific food blogs. Ultimately, Foodista plans to support itself through online advertising.

Usually when I cook from the Internet, I check four or five recipes for the same thing and pick those ingredients that I like the sound of and have at hand in the kitchen cupboard. You could say I already use a collaborative approach.

What a browse through online receipes shows is that no two people cook the same way - disagreements over whose grandmather cooked the best roast potatoes or carrot cake have probably wrecked marriages. This is probable the ultimate test of the Wiki format - but I personally think there's no reason it can't be a success with users. Whether it can make money through advertising is, as always another matter.

And if the foodies of the world can make a successful cooking encyclopedia, shouldn't your business be using Wikis to create its documentation and guidelines?

iSnack 2.0: Thinly spreading yeast extract all over the Web

From the Guardian's Word of Mouth foodie blog, comes the news that Aussie spread Vegemite has "crowdsourced" the name of its latest cheesy spread. The resulting Cheesymite (that's what I would call it) now has the somewhat lame name of iSnack 2.0. How last year, but excellent publicity nonetheless. I couldn't agree more with the excellent blog post linked earlier when it says this "can only be the biggest steaming honker of an egregious publicity stunt in recorded history."

There's more to recommend the post:

According to this story on news.com.au, the name for the much anticipated new product the result of a competition - always a good source of plausible deniability. And according to the manufacturers "the winning entry was chosen for its personal call to action and clear identification of a new and different Vegemite". (Thank God … I always imagined you had to be a British marketeer to talk that sort of bollocks.)

Now that's funny.

Man invoices sandwich shops for time spent waiting

The amazing thing is Prét a Manger and EAT actually sent him money or vouchers. Read the full story here, but here's a brief synopsis:

Paul McCrudden, a digital strategist, recorded all the time he spent as a consumer during the six weeks from the middle of June to the end of July. He sent invoices to 50 companies that he used.

He charged them £25.50 an hour – which is 25 per cent of his usual hourly rate at work – "to reflect the fact that time spent with them is not as 'productive' as it is with my employer".

While the whole thing is little more than a joke, it just goes to show how much shops want to create a positive impression - or perhaps don't want to upset anyone. And if it makes the press, everyone's a winner.

Brits are switching from coffee to herbal tea

According to the Financial Times:

“The decline has stopped,” said William Gorman, chairman of the UK Tea Council, adding that the tea market was expected to grow by 3 per cent this year, with speciality teas likely to boost sales by as much as 25 per cent. “[People] are waking up to the fact that tea is mostly water and antioxidants.”

Tomatoes, a "national tragedy"

This is how my mother, a Hungarian exile living in SW18 who knows exactly what a tomato should taste like, described the hard red balls found in British shops and supermarkets. And this even though she shops at a family grocer. She's right, it's a big mystery why tomatoes in the UK can't taste better.

Big Lunch aims to rebuild neglected communities

I mentioned in my previous post that women might get involved in more Internet-driven community projects in the future. Then I heard about "Big Lunch" a project to bring communities together by organising lunches, preferably with home-grown produce. The idea is simple, go to the website, tap in your postcode and find a Big Lunch near you on July 19.

And, of course, you can follow the latest news on the project on Twitter @thebiglunch (where we found out that 2,000 Big lunches have already been confirmed).