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A comedic tale for the fast-food friendly amongst you –

It was Bank Holiday Monday here in the UK a little while a go and, for me personally, post-big birthday celebrations for someone dear. For breakfast/lunch/hangover-medicine, Domino’s Pizza was chosen (don’t judge) and, as I went through the ordering process, the social creative agency part of my brain refused to switch off;

“Now, wouldn’t it be awesome if I could share this order… I was out with a whole bunch of mates last night and the sheer comedy value of participating in hangover junk food is just too good not to share.”

And so it was, as I was greeted by the post-payment ‘your order is being prepared’ screen I was invited to share my order! “Yes!” I thought “that’s EXACTLY what I want to do!” – but alas, the only option available to me was Twitter.

Interesting.

OK, let’s be clear: I am entering into this from a fairly unique use-case position. I am (probably) not Dominos’ average customer. In fact, I would even go so far as to suggest that the average Domino’s customer may not even have a Twitter account yet (although given the recent News International debacle, that’s definitely changing) – in the UK at least. Conversely, Facebook usage is definitely country-wide and yet the ‘share this order to my wall’ button is strangely absent.

Odd.

Parking that for a second, the whole thing got me thinking about audiences. Often, when discussing word of mouth strategies with new clients, we first address the planning and optimisation; where are these users/customers/consumers [delete where preferable] in social media, what communities do they belong to?

An obvious example would be discovering that a footwear company has zero exposure on Twitter but a huge Flickr following of photographers (who love shooting their feet, as it were), and prescribing a strategy model to fit against that, ie: DON’T start a Twitter channel – at least not yet anyway – engage with your fans and advocates on their platform of choice (not yours).

Bringing this back to Domino’s, I don’t want to share my post-hangover pizza with my 7000+ followers, however my Facebook friends, many of whom who were out with me on that particular weekend and (perhaps rather tellingly) also not on Twitter – I’d definitely tell them. Hell, some of them might even be local enough to come ‘round and steal a slice.

My point is: you follow people on Twitter, you friend them on Facebook.

Do you want to share personal experiences with your followers or your friends? Or perhaps even both? Domino’s – it would seem – would prefer it if I chose the former. However, little ol’ me, I’d only really be interested in sharing with the latter.

Purchase sharing is still only in its fledgling stages (and will only get bigger), naturally some brands are more friend-friendly than others. When you’re ordering pizza this weekend, have a think about that –

When the time comes, who would you rather share with?

NB: This blog post only came to me after I had finished the original pizza. So the two pepperoni passions I ordered the other night were purely for research and screen capture purposes. Honest.