The dangers of YouTube

Yet another company is in trouble after young employees posted a stupid prank on YouTube.

Last week, we had North Melbourne players degrading women on YouTube with a rubber chicken. This week, employees from Domino’s Pizza in the US got silly in the kitchen.

A Domino’s employee in Conover, North Carolina, while making sandwiches, put cheese up his nose, spread nasal mucus on the sandwiches, and violated other health-code standards.

Another employee narrated the events. A few days later the video had been viewed more than a million times and a discussion about it had started on Twitter.

The employees protested that they had never actually delivered the food but they were still fired. Worse for them, they were arrested and now face felony charges.

Apparently it only took a few days for Domino’s reputation to be damaged. Executives at Dominos decided not to respond aggressively, hoping the fuss would die down. But this made the problem worse. Commentators on Twitter were asking what the company was doing about it. The company was acting, but not reporting this on social media.

According to the New York Times, the perception of its quality among consumers went from positive to negative, according to the research firm YouGov, which holds online surveys of about 1000 consumers every day regarding hundreds of brands.

What was surprising about the story was that the employees were not teenagers. They were both in their 30s and should have known better. But it does drive home the fact to employers that when bringing on new employees, whether teenagers or older, they must talk to them about the reputation of the company.

Social media websites make it more important to emphasise to employees how important the image of their company is. Anything that employees do in a public sense that might implicate the company can damage the reputation of the company quite severely. The ground rules need to be clear. Don’t do anything to denigrate the reputation of the company.

Lawyer Peter Vitale says that existing case law that talks about employees who behave in a manner outside work that then affects the reputation of the employer can lead to termination. “That case law exists, and we are talking about an extension of that.”