• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, May 11, 2010

It's amazing how many things can go wrong when you are trying to give people something for free. Free giveaways just seem to keep ending in PR disaster (last year's Oprah KFC coupon debacle, for example) and when social media is involved, it's twice as bad. Just ask Dunkin' Donuts, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary with an iced coffee giveaway in select locations around the U.S.

As always, the devil is in the details: in this case, the problem is that "select locations" turns out to mean only about a dozen mid-sized cities across the U.S., which furthermore seem to be concentrated in a few regions: Baltimore and Salisbury, MD, Cleveland and Youngstown, OH, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, PA, Phoenix, Washington, DC, and Charlottesville, Harrisonburg, Norfolk, Richmond, and Roanoke, VA.

This is not an insignificant number of locations, and these aren't insignificant markets; but on the other hand, they don't quite meet my personal, subjective definition of "nationwide." It turns out this is just one of a rotating series of regional promotions scheduled to take place through the year -- a change from previous years. And while Dunkin' Donuts was pretty clear about the limited extent of the promotion, people obviously just didn't read the small print, apparently expecting it to be a coordinated, truly national event covering every Dunkin' Donuts location. Thousands of consumers showed up at non-participating locations only to be turned away, coffee-less. Indignation and social media backlash followed in short order.

A sampling of recent comments, posted in the last hour on the Dunkin' Donuts Facebook page:

"what about Chicago thanks alot DD I buy your shit every day"

"Dunkins was founded in Quincy Massachusetts and we don't even rate for a free one!!!"

"not having free iced coffee in New England of all places is just a slap in the face"

Now, you can blame dimwitted consumers for not reading the terms and locations of the promotion, but the fact remains that this is fairly predictable human behavior which resulted in damage to the Dunkin' Donuts brand. Moreover, the blowback illustrates the potential for social media to suddenly become a negative PR channel. When what was intended to be a limited, regional promotion goes awry, the brand's own social network profiles become lightning rods for consumer complaints, aggregating and distributing hostile sentiments almost like a national broadcast medium.

Needless to say, this is probably not what Dunkin' Donuts intended when they set up their Facebook profile. But it raises key questions for marketers about the complex, potentially chaotic relationship between (among other things) local and national advertising, corporate communications, retail experience, and consumer-facing social media.

In my opinion, the most important questions in this case are: how could Dunkin' Donuts avoid the misunderstanding in the first place? Assuming the misunderstanding was unavoidable, could the company have some kind of effective response prepared ahead of time? And, once negative comments began showing up on the Facebook profile, was there anything the company could do to limit or mitigate the damage?