The problem with two-way communications is they tend to cut both ways.

The Web has definitely opened new possibilities for interacting with consumers. But it’s also given voice to some of the crankiest, most vocally disenfranchised people on Earth. When any blogger or video crank can take a chunk out of your brand, how exactly do you control your message?

The obvious answer is, you don’t. Less obvious: Nobody ever really has. Brands exist in the minds of consumers, which are notoriously hard to control, and in reality, product and circumstance have far more to do with a brand than a company’s attempts to manage it.

Take Domino’s Pizza. Long before the Internet, Domino’s had built a major international brand around their 30-minute delivery guarantee which they celebrated in a 1983 ad campaign featuring a giggly troll who chilled pizzas for a living. But when a troubled young man in Atlanta saw the spots, he decided the tagline—Avoid the Noid—hit just a little too close to home. So Kenneth Lamar Noid grabbed a .357, stormed a local Domino’s and held two employees hostage for five hours, demanding, among other things, a free pizza. The incident was not a disaster for Domino’s, but it was hardly a red-letter day in message control.

The real disaster struck 10 years later, when a St. Louis jury awarded $78 million to a woman who was run over by a Domino’s driver. The accident was one in a long series attributable to the 30-minute guarantee, which had, in effect, turned America’s streets into a giant game of Super Mario Kart. Domino’s CEO denounced the award, but abandoned the guarantee—and with it a key competitive advantage.

Then last year, a new set of woes: A group of Domino’s employees filmed themselves snotting on pizzas and stuffing cheese into places where no cheese should go. The video became an Internet sensation and a PR nightmare for Domino’s. As Domino’s execs dug deeper, they found something even more disturbing than the video itself.

People detested their pizza.

“’Worst excuse for pizza I’ve ever tasted,’” intoned one Domino’s executive, quoting a customer. The comments went on and on—“The crust tastes like cardboard” and ”the sauce is like ketchup.” So numerous and derisive were the consumer reviews that together they amounted to a wholesale indictment of Domino’s product. But this critical mass of criticism provided the mandate Domino’s needed to take a lifesaving risk.

They spent millions reformulating their recipe. They upgraded ingredients, changed suppliers and revamped procedures around the world. In December 2009, Domino’s rolled out the new recipe with a new ad campaign, this one designed to live on the Web where their problems and their markets now resided. The campaign was a stunning admission of failure on the one hand. On the other, it was a bold realignment of product and message, one that recognized candor and transparency as the new currency of successful online brands. Domino’s campaign videos opened with their own customers blasting their product.

Enlightened companies worldwide are starting to grasp the implications of losing control. They’re building new structures and processes around the new realities of the Web. Most major airlines now use Twitter to address service issues individually, in real time. Coke and NetFlix have ceded control of their Facebook pages to the fans who created them, accepting the bad with the considerable good.

And in March of 2010, Domino’s reported a whopping 14.3 percent increase in same-store sales and an 18.1 percent growth in revenues, most of which they attribute to their reinvention.

		Mike Van Egeren is the founder and creative director of BANG!, a Lansing-based marketing group specializing in content strategy and development.