If you haven't heard all the buzz about Dominos, then you haven't been online.

Don't worry. We're not going to rehash it. Adweek was right to say that most communication bloggers would eventually give the pizza chain credit for an effective, if somewhat sluggish, response. About 100,000 or so bloggers did, anyway.

And, if there was any extra cheese during the whole ordeal, then it came from Ragan Communications. They added an entire 30 minutes to a 3.5-hour virtual conference dedicated to the infamous Dominos YouTube video.

But you won't find any mention of this incident on my blog. And if you did, it wouldn't be about Dominos as much as the people writing about Dominos. They all jumped the pie pan.

To be an effective blogger, whether you are a communicator or a recruiter, you have to know when to post and when not to post. Given this thinness of this issue and frequency of opinion, it was almost a no brainer to say nothing at all. This is why...

Knowing When Not To Post

• When the impact is minimal, e.g., two sandwiches and even that is suspect, it probably doesn't need to be written about.

• When the novelty is only because it was shared online, e.g., as if teenagers or young adults never joked about tainting fast food (and sometimes they do), but is otherwise as common as the nose on your face.

• The timeliness of the story is so short and with such little substance, it leaves virtually no lessons to be learned except from those who contrive a deeper meaning than the incident deserves, e.g., it only takes two people to destroy a brand (yeah, right).

• It won't change people's lives or better any business or cause new laws to be written.

• The people involved are just regular people with regular jobs, blowing off some steam in a mundane but disgusting fashion.

• The story doesn't lend itself to some disastrous or emotional misfortune.

• People generally all see and say the same thing, so much so, every post and comment can be summed up as "what she/he said."

There is no story about Dominos pizza. And with exception to humor blogs, which were best suited to poke fun at the misguided workers who posted their antics online, it didn't deserve the attention it received when there are hundreds of better stories that could have been told. In sum, the only story is that a non-story became a story because people didn't want to "feel" like their "same" opinion was left out.

If you want to be effective with a message, don't talk about what everyone else does. Find some fresh content, or, as I have a tendency to do from time to time, lend something to it that no one else thought of or approach it from a completely unique perspective. Sure, a few bloggers did when it came to Dominos, but only a very, very small few.

As an additional takeaway for recruiters, it might be wise to listen to candidates closely too. It might not be those who offer patented applicant responses, e.g., "my biggest weakness is that I work too hard," that you really want to place.

On the contrary, when I grade accreditation exams, I look for those rare applicants that make me tilt my head for a moment and say "wow, that might really have something there." All the rest of it, well, if we're being honest, it's just the echo of a whole bunch of overheard chatter.

And as soon as you know when to sense it, then the only thing worth writing about pepperoni is why you aren't going to bother writing about pepperoni. Because the only thing uglier than transparency is pretending to be authentic. A landmark event in crisis management, indeed.