Social Media Highlights: Dunkin' Donuts, Pizza Hut, Domino's and More

Yesterday I wrote about Cadbury's success with social media in the UK, where Facebook fans demanded Cadbury relaunch Wispa Gold, a favorite old chocolate bar. Here are some cool social media news items from closer to home.

Dunkin' Donuts launched a program that helps coordinate donut runs. The user creates a list of friends or colleagues, and then when that person heads to Dunkin' Donuts, the group gets an alert and can let the person know if they want anything. The user can either print the compiled order sheet or view it on their iPhone. I think this is one of the best new social networking ideas I've come across -- though it really only works for groups of people who (like me) live online and will respond to such a request within seconds.

Pizza Hut has hired a 22-year-old to run its Twitter account for the summer -- another really good idea. Hiring youngsters is definitely the way to go; I'm only 30 and I often feel like I'm too old to really get Twitter. Plus, the "Twintern" is on the job full-time, meaning she can respond to fellow tweeters within seconds.

In a significantly less brilliant move, Domino's introduced Pizza Tracker, which tells customers the name of the employee who is making their pizza. It also lets people create their pizza virtually beforehand to see what it looks like. Apparently the system is "clean and user-friendly" and otherwise very well-done, but I'm not sure it's that interesting or useful.

A few other tidbits:

• Chipotle has been running its own "My Chipotle" site, where customers can submit their favorite burrito combinations. Now the company is looking for ads and offering $10,000 for the winning submission.

• Whole Foods has a free iPhone application that will give you recipes (with grocery lists, of course) and store locations. The branded iPhone recipe application idea was first tried by Kraft back in December.

• And finally, Brand Republic reports that Pepsi and Coca-Cola bonded on Twitter after a third party wrote them both and said, "RT to end an old war: Dear @pepsi and @cocacola, why not follow each other on Twitter and be friends :)" Though I can't imagine that such rivals wouldn't have been keeping track of one another's tweets from the beginning.