Pizza Hut has announced its first full-time Twitterer. Following a successful internship, the lucky Tweetologist, Alexa Robinson, has the task of interacting with the company’s fans through @pizzahut on Twitter.
Her role is to communicate outbound pro-Pizza Hut messages of 140 characters or less, and, perhaps more importantly, to monitor Twitter for any negative sentiment. Pizza Hut is rightly sensitive about the impact of social media on brand reputation after the YouTube debacle of April 2009 in which two employees were shown behaving in ways that were, how to say this politely, less than hygienic. The clips have been taken down from YouTube but you can still view them here http://www.goodasyou.org/good_as_you/2009/04/video-let-the-dominoes-appa...
I wish Alexa and Pizza Hut good fortune with this innovation. Others will follow, for sure, and if successful, more jobs will be created. How long before this becomes seen as a significant business opportunity for customer service outsourcers in the Philippines, India and elsewhere?