No Social Media Monitoring Strategy Helped Kill Motrin Moms Ad

Think about that for a minute. A targeted advertisement by one of the most respected pharmaceutical companies in the world was brought down in less than 48 hours by a relatively small number of social network users. What’s more, these social network users were on Twitter - one of the social networks many companies find most challenging to use because of its format of 140 character messages, and a culture of interaction - not broadcast.

Motrin used traditional media to distribute the advertisement - they weren’t using social media specifically for distribution of this ad. It was on the Motrin.com website and YouTube, but it was also distrubuted via traditional and print media - “Safe media”. Not using social media for the main ad push likely made Motrin advertisers consider putting resources elsewhere, and not in a social media monitoring strategy. Yet, by not having a solid social monitoring strategy in place, the outrage of Twitterers to the ad swelled so quickly that Motrin didn’t notice until it was too late, and ultimately lost complete control of the entire campaign.

Some consequences of no Social Monitoring Strategy

The advertisement was a bust - it had to completely stopped. The financial implications of their misstep are likely painful. Here’s a shot of the graphic on the Motrin.com homepage.

Motrin apology

Motrin did the right thing in acknowledging it’s mistake of offending baby-carrying Moms, and then removing the ads. Their sincere tone and thanks for public feedback will likely help this debacle become a thing of the past soon.

But your company is likely not as well funded as Motrin. What lesson should you take away from Motrin’s very public social media misstep?

Don’t ignore Social Media: Even if you never promote your company via social media networks, don’t ignore it. Hire a Social Media Marketing Consultant or agency today to help you develop a relationship and monitoring strategy. Skipping this step can devalue your brand, and cost your company millions of dollars and customers.

Check out some of the brands who got punk’d by social media (via Forrester’s Jeremy Owyang).

UPDATE:
For those of you who haven’t seen the ad yet, the Motrin Moms ad is still available here.

One troubling aspect of ‘citizen journalists’ and the relationship unknown and untested bloggers have with respected online news journals is that sometimes these bloggers submit posts which have a detrimental effect on business. This situation has been seen over and over again. Last month for instance, a wrongly dated post about United Airlines caused stock prices to plummet 75%. Most recently in yet another false post about Steve Jobs’ health, Apple stock plummeted upon news on iReport.com of Steve Jobs being rushed to the hospital after a heart attack. Apple officials quickly rejected the post as untrue, and the story has since been pulled from iReport.com, where it originated.

If the false post wasn’t enough of a pain for CNN (the owner of iReport), the SEC is now investigating the false claims about Jobs. Registration on iReport.com only requires a working email address, but CNN is handing over what information they have about the author of the Steve Jobs post.

Twitter was abuzz with news of Steve Job’s heart attack, and many considered the value of their Apple stock declining in tweets to this popular micro-blogging service. Anecdotally, I noted very few tweets relating to the story being revealed as bogus once Apple rejected the claim. Much work is going in to correct the rumor and speculation, but for Apple, the damage is ongoing. 

Who is ultimately responsible for ‘citizen journalists’? If we, as bloggers can post to mainstream media news sites, what obvious system is in place to ensure the accuracy of each post? Offline when I take my old clothes to a consignment shop for donation, each item goes through a simple inspection to make sure they’re up to the stores quality standard. Certainly online, when ‘citizen journalists’ have the ability to post news stories which can erase millions of dollars in market value, why isn’t there at least the most rudimentary quality standard in place? The short answer is speed. News networks are under increasing pressure to be the first to release an important news story, so they prefer to deal with possible consequences later rather than miss the opportunity to be the first. I submit that a simple quality check should be in place for all mainstream news sites, which requires first and last name, working email address and no submissions from a blocked IP address. Surely, there are simple workarounds to these rudimentary submission standards, but also as sure they will likely eliminate some of the market instability caused by the rumor mill.

What other submission standards should online news journals implement to help ensure the accuracy of stories submitted by ‘citizen journalists’? I’d like to hear your views.

Our little Salt Lake City Tweetup group is gaining some speed. We’ve planned a short-notice tweetup for October 2, 2008. Incidentally, this tweetup occurs on the same date as the VP debate, so we’ve adjusted our original location to allow those who want to watch the debates to do so at the Tweetup.

Here’s the Tweetup details - we’d love to have any Twitter friends, old or new:

Coffee Break
435 E 400 S
Salt Lake City, UT
7 PM -

I’ll be uploading photos of the Tweetup soon, and here’s a little advance notice - we’ve got a very special Tweetup planned for October 20. Please clear your calendar and join us.

See you at the Tweetup!

A recently sponsored nationwide online digital marketing and interactive advertising survey by Sapient revealed some insightful results from its respondents. This was no mere web poll, the participants were “more than 200 chief marketing officers (CMOs) and senior marketing professionals, all of whom are either directly or indirectly responsible for managing digital marketing budget allocation across multiple channels”.

Here’s the top 3 results I think are especially sapient (Ha!) for those of us in social media:

• More than 1/3 of marketers surveyed revealed that they are not confident that their current agency is well-positioned to take their brand through the unchartered waters of online digital marketing and interactive advertising.

• When trying to engage consumers with their brand, 90 percent of respondents agree that it is becoming increasingly important that their agency uses ‘pull interactions’ such as social media and online communities rather than traditional ‘push’ campaigns.

• It’s no surprise that marketers want an agency that can report on where campaigns succeeded, fell short and where they should be fine-tuned. Sixty-five percent ranked analytics at the top of their agency wish list.

These results are a real kick in the pants for interactive agencies. I recently met with some execs from a local interactive shop representing the 2nd largest advertising agency in the world. They were scared stiff to even consider talking about social media to their largely tech clientele. This agency excels on the creative side, and recently won awards for a great “viral video” they designed for one of their Fortune 1000 clients. But a search for this viral video doesn’t immediately connect it with the client it was representing! The only search results for the client promoted in this “viral video” are well below the fold. No viral video results at all show when I search for the company name. It takes some real searching to even figure out who the viral video was created for. There’s a HUGE disconnect there. That client paid 6 figures for this ‘viral video’ campaign, and yet finding out who the video is supposedly promoting is a real challenge. What’s the ROI in that for their client? It seems to have paid off more for the interactive agency, what with the design awards and all.

This is the kind of thing marketers can no longer tolerate. In the past, when advertising successs was measured only by reach, this may have been considered a successful campaign. Now with the specific analytics tools which make agencies much more accountable for the results of their campaigns, results like the ones above are simply unacceptable.

Smart interactive agencies will continue seeking out social media professionals and re-evaluating how to best serve their clients. Social media marketing is certainly not about creative advertising that still “pushes” a message on customers. That old standard is crumbling fast, and many agencies are hurting as they scramble to understand the new medium that is totally “pull” based and customer-centric.

Some social media marketing detractors speak against the need for a professional standard to this medium since its ruled by customers. But as a consultant, I look at things from both the business’ and the customer’s viewpoint. Businesses are completely like a fish out of water and frustrated when they see customers lamblasting their brand all over social networks. So they generally either bury their heads in the sand and throw money at their interactive agency to create more digital advertising, or bravely create social network accounts and sometimes anonomously get involved in a negative discussion about their brand and try to change opinions – unknown and with no authority, so often to be found out – heaping even more dirt on a struggling brand. Don’t think this won’t happen with you or your clients – some of the biggest brands in the US fell into this trap.

A Social Media Professional’s job, especially in consulting interactive agencies and/or their clients, eliminates this kind of self-inflicted brand wound and can very often stop the hemorraging from previous decisions based on the traditional “push” mentality. In business, its the customers that matter anyway – not the creativity of an ad. The real focus should be on building relationships with the customers, not so much on the Creative Director of an agency. Social Media Marketing professionals are needed as the solid bridge from traditional marketing to greater levels of business transparency and customer interaction.

Check out the full text of the CMO answers here: Survey Reveals Brand Marketers’ Top 10 Wish List for Agencies of the Future

Social media goes Hollywood! Paris Hilton has been spotted with the CEO of MySpace and theres lots of speculation that the couple are dating. The buzz around this is enough to bring the attention of celebrity hungry viewers to social media, particularly MySpace.

Of course, on a more practical vein, Paris may be keeping the CEO of MySpace close for some extra security to keep those private photos from always surfacing on MySpace. But then, rumor has it that MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe is her #1 MySpace friend…

Get the full skinny at TechCrunch: The Perks Of Being The MySpace CEO Include, Apparently, Paris Hilton

More on Paris Hilton Spotted with MySpace CEO at BloggersBlog

For corporate blogs, this is one of the biggest news stories for a long time. In an article by Brian Solis, he explains what the SEC recognizing blogs as public disclosure means for Social Corporations.

Read the full article over at TechCrunch: SEC To Recognize Corporate Blogs As Public Disclosure. Can We Now Kill The Press Release?

Blogs, forums, YouTube videos, bookmark sites all seem to thrive on bad news and negative hype. Bad news gets traffic. Negative hype sells. But even though negative hype is like smack to many social network users, there’s a growing number of people who, in an effort to keep things balanced, are unpopularly trying to bring “nice” back to social networking.

One such example was just a couple of days ago. A relatively small group of Twitter users got fed up with the endless talk about Twitter’s Fail Whale (the default page graphic that displays when Twitter is overcapacity or down for maintenance). This small group of positive thinkers decided instead to celebrate Twitter’s success and openly pimped the Twitter Prevail Whale.

more…