Much to her surprise, a little while later she received a tweet back from Ramon De Leon who owns multiple locations of Dominos in the Chicago area. He acknowledged her tweet and promised to make it right. She was already waiting for a new pizza to replace the wrong one, so she figured short of a coupon that this would be the end of it. Little did she know what was about to happen. . . .

She woke up the next day to a video⁵⁹ that was made for her by Ramon as well as “Junior,” the store manager of the specific location she had ordered from. This is perhaps the best 2½ minute video any business owner could see. It has both of Domino’s reps apologizing for what happened, not making up any excuses, and you can truly see the passion behind their words—that they really do want to make it right. Amy was quite taken aback when she saw this video. She doesn’t have a million followers, she isn’t Ashton Kutcher, she was simply one dissatisfied customer. Keyword here is “was.” After seeing the video she forwarded it to others and it caught on like wildfire. The video to date has been viewed more than 100,000 times around the world. Sadly, one of the reasons it has been viewed so many times is that it is so rare for companies to own their mistakes. When people complain to you, they are first looking for validation, not compensation. They want to know that they have been heard, they want to know that they matter, and they want to know that you care.

Ramon acknowledged her as quickly as possible on Twitter, which never would have happened in the first place if he hadn’t understood that word of mouth happens with or without him. He took a negative and turned it into an exponential positive. If I told you that I had a room full of current potential customers all talking about your products and your competitors, would you not show up? Not listening and then acting on social media chatter is like not showing up at all. The only thing worse is to have a presence in social media and only talk and not listen. It would be like showing up in the room with earplugs on.

For you to hear what people are saying about your company is simple. Run a search on Twitter by using your company name. There are also tools you can use to make this search easier, such as setting up custom columns on TweetDeck. From a free Google alert set up for your keywords to using a service like Radian6, which is a tool to listen to, measure, and engage with your market across all social media sites. On top of that you can use these same tools to keep on top of what your competition is doing and what people are saying about them.

Ramon ended up making things right by showing up to an event that Amy was a part of, not only because he happened to be catering it, but so that he and Junior could drop off a personal pizza for her along with a dozen roses.