This week, a disturbing YouTube video posted by two disgruntled Domino’s employees quickly went viral. The video, titled “Disgusting Domino’s People,” shows the employees doing gross things to the food they would eventually serve.

The implications for the Domino’s brand are catastrophic. Though it was an isolated incident in one store, it spread throughout the country through various social media channels. Domino’s franchises on the other side of the country will most likely feel the fallout of this incident. It’s a scary reminder of the power of viral marketing.

While the impact is unavoidable, Domino’s acted swiftly to respond to the incident on YouTube. Today Domino’s posted this personal response from the company’s president, Patrick Doyle.

What can we learn from Domino’s response?

Act fast.

Domino’s issued a press release immediately, but it was two full days before they responded to the video directly on YouTube. Two days is a lifetime when it comes to viral content. The faster you respond, the faster you can steer the conversation.

Viral content lasts forever — so should your response.

The most effective response will reach out directly to the viral audience that spread the damaging content. Today’s YouTube statement was much more effective than Tuesday’s press release, and it will continue to reach customers even as the press coverage dies down.

Viral content lasts forever, but a press release only lasts through one news cycle. To ensure that the video will continue to reach their customers affected by the damaging content, Domino’s wisely included the title from the original video in their response and added “Domino’s Responds.” When people search YouTube to find the video they’ve heard so much about, they’ll also find a direct response from the company. Like the damaging viral video, this response will last forever.

Don’t just apologize, take action.

Instead of playing the victim and placing all the blame on the employees, Doyle clearly outlines the actions Domino’s will take to protect their customers in the future. Not only does he assure customers that the specific store has been sterilized, but he assures them that Domino’s is working to prevent this from happening again. “We’re re-examining all of our hiring practices to make sure that people like this don’t make it into our stores,” he says.

Make the last word a good one.

The last minute of the Domino’s response is devoted to displaying the brand in a positive light. Your response is your opportunity to get the last word in. Don’t waste it rehashing the negative press. Use it to remind your customers why they should trust you.

Unfortunately, social media and user generated content have made it much harder for brands to shield themselves from this type of damage. That’s why it’s more important than ever that you know and understand how to use social media channels to promote your company positively and protect your brand from damaging viral content. Through smart use of social media, you can shift the conversation to correct the damage just as quickly as it was done.

This week, Tropicana made waves with the swift failure of a massive rebranding effort.

PepsiCo, owners the well established Tropicana brand, sought to capitalize on the economic downturn through marketing. They hired New York ad agency Arnell to implement a complete redesign of the Tropicana logo and packaging. Arnell is also responsible for the recent Pepsi logo revamp, which was criticized for its striking resemblance to Barack Obama’s campaign logo.

The$35 million rebranding effort backfired big time. Fiercely loyal customers fired off angry emails and blog rants complaining about the new packaging. PepsiCo and Tropicana quickly announced that the old, familiar packaging will return to the shelves by next month.

So what happened? According to the New York Times assessment of the debacle, social media factored into the equation in a big way:

Such attention is becoming increasingly common as interactive technologies enable consumers to rapidly convey opinions to marketers.

“You used to wait to go to the water cooler or a cocktail party to talk over something,” said Richard Laermer, chief executive at RLM Public Relations in New York.

“Now, every minute is a cocktail party,” he added. “You write an e-mail and in an hour, you’ve got a fan base agreeing with you.”

That ability to share brickbats or bouquets with other consumers is important because it facilitates the formation of ad hoc groups, more likely to be listened to than individuals.

The Tropicana debacle is reminiscent to the “Motrin Moms” disaster last November. Angry moms took to Twitter to complain about a Motrin ad campaign that offended them. Within 48 hours, Motrin executives had publicly apologized and scrapped the expensive campaign.

What could Tropicana have done differently to successfully rebrand without throwing their most loyal customers into an uproar? If they had used social media to involve their most loyal customers in the process, it would have been a powerful tool in their rebranding process. Instead social media worked against them as customers joined forces to increase the fallout.

What if they had given customers a vote on the new packaging? They would have enjoyed the benefit of months of publicity leading up to the unveiling. Most importantly, they wouldn’t have faced the bad press, the outrage of their loyal customers, or the cost of undoing the $35 million rebranding campaign.

Marketers can learn a valuable lesson from Tropicana’s mistake. Social media has forever changed the way that consumers interact with brands and marketing tactics. If you don’t converse with your customers, it could cost you.

The way we use search engines is about to be turned upside down. Yahoo! is finalizing an application that will keep track of your searches, recognize when you are doing research and store the information for later use. The new tool, Yahoo! Search Pad, is still in the test phases, but according to company previews the tool will work like an elaborate bookmarking system.

For example, if you are researching a vacation and purchasing a new TV, separate categories will emerge in your Search Pad that will allow you to keep sites organized and grouped. You can go back to the Search Pad and write summaries about the sites you have visited, delete sites you no longer need and order them as you see fit. The tool can be turned off on a search by search basis or turned off completely.Yahoo! Search Pad is a great example of how Yahoo! is working to set themselves apart from Google and other search engines.

To learn more about this new tool check out this video from Tom Chi, Senior Director of Product Management for Yahoo Search.

A recent study by the Google User Experience Research team (featured here at WebProNews) determined that searches have become so routine that users tend to make decisions about where to look and what to click unconsciously. But Google is clever. They’re using eye-tracking technology to gather valuable information about how users scan search results:

“Based on eye-tracking studies, we know that people tend to scan the search results in order. They start from the first result and continue down the list until they find a result they consider helpful and click it — or until they decide to refine their query. The heatmap below shows the activity of 34 usability study participants scanning a typical Google results page. The darker the pattern, the more time they spent looking at that part of the page. This pattern suggests that the order in which Google returned the results was successful; most users found what they were looking for among the first two results and they never needed to go further down the page.”

According to Google, adding images to a search results page does not affect the order in which users view results. Even if images appear below text links, users’ eyes are drawn to the top results first.

These results aren’t surprising. They prove what any SEO-savvy marketer already knows — one of the most effective ways of getting noticed on the Web is appearing in the top organic results for your strongest keywords. What does surprise me is how quickly users lose interest in a results page — many users don’t even look beyond the second result.

If you’re not at the top or close to it, now might be the time to revamp your search engine optimization strategy to make sure you’re capitalizing on the power of organic search.

You probably use Google Analytics or another search tracking tool on your website (and if you don’t, you should). What makes these applications so powerful for SEO is their ability to show exactly how potential customers are finding your site — especially when it comes to keywords.

If you regularly monitor your analytics, you’re able to see exactly what keywords users are typing into search engines to find your website. This information is extremely useful from an SEO perspective, because it tells you whether you’re optimizing for the right keywords. It also helps measure the success of an optimization by showing whether the keywords you’ve used to optimize your site are actually drawing in traffic.

Google recently began testing a new search interface powered by AJAX. What you need to know is that this could wreak havoc on the ability to track keyword searches with an analytics tracking tool.

You already may have started noticing referral traffic from “Google.com.” This is caused by the way the AJAX interface handles searches. In the past, the URL in your navigation bar after a search looked like this:

Analytics tools are able to fish the keywords out of that search to show you what keywords your visitors are searching for in order to find your site.

If your search is being affected by the AJAX testing, your URL after searching will look like this:

The difference is in the “#” symbol after the word “search.” It’s called a hashtag, and analytics tools are unable to read search terms after the hashtag. Instead of specifying which keywords were used in the search, they list the referral from “Google.com,” which means you lose valuable data about the keywords.

According to a statement from Google, this is only a test, and they “have no intention to disrupt referrer tracking.” This isn’t a permanent switch — yet. However, if you regularly monitor your site’s analytics and keywords, your referrer tracking may already be disrupted by these tests.

In November, Google announced a new way for users to personalize search results pages. This blend of social media, bookmarking, and search is a new way to tailor search engines to your needs.

Once you sign into your Google account, you’re able to remove, rearrange, and comment on search results. While you can save and share these notes, they do not affect the way that Google ranks pages for other users … yet.

But this is only the beginning for interactive search. It shows that search engines are noticing the popularity and usability of social bookmarking sites like Digg, and may indicate a shift in the search world from shadowy algorithm-based rankings to a format that resembles social bookmarking  in the near future.