“We’re fairly light-hearted and witty as a brand”, Domino’s head of digital Nick Dutch on engagement and paid social
“In a category where purchase and consumption generally happen within 30 minutes of each other we get very rapid and real-time customer ‘feedback’,” Nick Dutch, head of digital at Domino’s Pizza UK says, stating why Twitter is the most important channel for the brand.
Nick Dutch
“Whilst volume is high on Facebook that tends to stay relatively contained whereas a great response or a poor one really can travel on Twitter.”
As one of the judges for this year’s Social Buzz Awards, in association with iomart, Dutch says that a good entry should avoid using the word ‘engagement’, admitting “I don’t know what it means, despite banding it around left, right and centre myself”.
Dutch himself started his dalliance into the social media sphere while working at COI. “I was part of the team that launched a campaign ‘yes to the test’ encouraging teenagers to be tested for Chlamydia... must have been 2008/9,” he explained.
“We created a Facebook page…it certainly taught me to embrace trolls! Chlamydia word clouds anyone?”
Now, as then, Dutch realises that social is something that is not in isolation, and stated that he is hoping to see campaigns that didn’t treat social as something that exists in isolation and therefore are not ‘campaigns that used social’ but ‘campaigns that incorporated a social element as it was the most effective way in which to reach the desired business objective’.
He added: “It’s a fallacy that you can spend £5m a year on TV and assume that can then be converted to £100k in social and get the same results. We’re certainly not in that place yet and of all our paid channels social is still at the lower end of the scale in proportion of spend.
"That said we’ve invested more and more in the past 12 months in paid distribution, customer services and content creation and we’ve really seen the impact both within the channel (dare I say ‘engagement’ levels) but importantly in other areas such as our brand tracker for sales influence and in our attribution. “
When asked about the witty tone of voice favoured by Domino’s Pizza in its social channels, Dutch put this down to being “fairly light-hearted and witty as a brand”.
Just when you think we've made everything under the sun… pic.twitter.com/0dD3GfEQ6a
— Domino's Pizza UK (@Dominos_UK) July 10, 2014
“Social obviously has additional benefits in as much as it allows a two way conversation and therefore more opportunity to demonstrate that tone and also take it further (or reign it in) dependent on the individual conversation which obviously helps. When you’ve no way of gauging how far to go with something you tend to stay a bit safer” he explained.
It is important, he said, to ensure you don’t get scared of mistakes and revert to bland straight away: “We’ve certainly had a few mistakes along the way but we’ve not allowed that to deter us!”
Got a campaign that fulfils Dutch’s criteria? You only have two weeks - until 13 August - to enter it into the Social Buzz Awards.