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.

“From the last seven years of polling, we’ve found that what older people like best about the Internet is being able to connect to family and friends,” - Susannah Fox - Pew Internet & American Life Project and the Kaiser Family Foundation

New family social networks are popping up almost every day. The real draw to these sites for Boomers seems to be the huge disconnections families have these days. More families are geographically separated from each other than ever before. With the holiday season rapidly approaching, the family event coordinator (usually a Boomer) is looking to the internet to connect geographically distant family members. Family is a big deal to Boomers, and family social networks provide an easy way to gather the family group together again.

Boomers also feel a need to pass on to their family and the next generation the story of where they began. So family social networks are not only a place to connect socially, but they’re also a place to discover your family’s past, and discover yourself in the process.

In meeting with family social networking executives recently, I’m finding that one of hottest trends in family social networks is in the field of DNA social networking. I recently spoke to a company whose USP is based on having a large database of DNA results for users to access. There’s huge potential in this area of social networking. So much so that Google recently invested $3.9 million in a DNA social networking startup called 23andMe. The goal of DNA social networking sites like this is to help users gain a better understanding of their genetic information, and track down lost or distant relatives.

Famiva.com

Famiva Home Page

Famiva  just had a major update over the weekend, and the look is clean and appealing.  Within Famiva, users can work with family members on a secure site to “build your family tree, share photos and stories, stay current with family events and reminders, and much more.” What Boomers will like about Famiva is how easy it is. There’s no sign-up required and has really great features to capture genealogy as well as connect current family.They also have a great tour which makes it easy to know exactly what to expect from the network.

Genoom.com
Genoom is an innovative site with a bevy of tools to create private family networks. Genoom helps family researchers not only learn about their past, but connect family together for current events and create digital heirlooms for future generations.

Geni.com
Geni  is a great great family social network which helps users trace their family roots. Geni also has the family tree, photo sharing, and event calendar of other family social networks, but it also allows users to add family friends as “friends of your family tree”.

Obviously, boomers are becoming more active in social media, one study last year cites that 45% of boomers online are using family social networks. What does this mean for businesses looking to advertise on social media? Don’t count out baby boomers in your social advertising plans. They’ve got financial strength that many Gen Y and X don’t have yet, so if your product or service has any overlap for the boomer generation, either as users or buyers, make them the focus of some of your marketing efforts.

If you’re ready to create a social media marketing strategy, and would like to see how you can incorporate boomers into that strategy, contact me. Let’s talk about how we can work together to help you reach your goals.

ghennipher [at] ghennipher.net

Your product sales and customer loyalty will also not be improved anymore by paying high-minded consultants high fees to berate your previous marketing campaigns and insist that only their proprietary (read: excessively expensive) methodology will work for you. Your customers are rejecting that kind of manipulation.

Celebrity endoresements? Press releases? Interactive advertising? SEO? Still effective methods to get your website seen, to be sure. They’re nothing to dismiss in your efforts for website visibility. But you want *more* than just to be seen, right? You want customers who are loyal to your brand, even when other companies slash prices. You want customers who are so excited about your product that they tell their friends. And their friends, in turn, tell their friends. Ultimately, you want more sales, more consistently, with less expense on your part. You want the promise of Social Media Marketing. But leveraging Social Media to reach concrete business metrics is a mystery to most companies still.

Your customers ignore marketing messages and refuse to be manipulated - but that’s what traditional marketing is built on. So how do you use Social Media to reach your customers with the message they want to hear? The message they want to respond to?

I’ve consulted businesses in the area of social media strategy, and what follows are some of the most common (and easily solved) concerns about social media marketing I hear.

Mystery #1
“We created a blog and our own social media network, signed up for other popular networks and blast our specials to our “Friends” but our sales haven’t really improved. In fact, we sometimes even get hostile reactions to our offers. What gives? We’re just trying to help.”

Mystery #2
“We got celebrity endorsement for our product, set up a website with a blog, do SEO and PPC, but our online sales are still flat. The product really moves when customers who love the product tell their friends about it. We’re thinking of going into an MLM model.”

Mystery #3
“Social Media Marketing is a fad and it doesn’t bring in revenues. We’re just focusing on improving our search engine rankings, and we think that’s enough. We’re only getting into social media marketing because our strongest competitor is, and we have to stay competitive.”

In my next post, I’ll share some of the advice I gave the companies who made these mysterious statements above, and give some anecdotal results of improvements made when implementing a solid social media marketing strategy.

This is an important question, because a large number of companies have jumped into social media campaigns without any clear business and communication strategy. Before the financial meltdown of the last few weeks, some companies had the resources to experiment with social media without worrying about financial accountability. But now, most businesses are forced into having solid success metrics for social media.

In fact, the lack of good metrics is cited as the biggest barrier to marketers’ adoption of social media. Particularly in this shaky financial climate, measuring impact is one of the definitive measures of a marketing strategy’s value. If you want to skip the experimentation, particularly in view of our current global financial crisis, I’ve assembled a list of 5 tips to help you measure success in your social media campaigns.

Success Tip #1: Identify your communications target and listen to them
The first step to measuring success in social media marketing is proper scope. There are new social networks popping up each week. It’s a waste of resources to join every new social network only to find you have no time to manage them. Find out where your most active customers & influencers spend time online – then listen and take notes.

Blogosphere Listening Tools: 

• Technorati
• Google Blog Search
• Ice Rocket
• Bloglines
• Twitter Search
• AideRSS

 Success Tip #2: Become involved in conversations
The second measurement of success is consistently utilizing social media to engage customers. Sure, in the identify/listen stage, you might have heard some things about your company that weren’t very complimentary. That’s ok. Your job now is to engage these customers and find a way to help. Be willing to acknowledge mistakes when they happen. Customers are surprisingly forgiving of honesty by a company.

If you’re one of the lucky companies who have only enthusiastic and happy customers, recognize their need to interact with your brand. Be open to engage with them on their turf. They’ll reward your brand with greater enthusiasm – which is a message that spreads through social networks like wildfire, and solidifies your brand.

How involved is your brand in communicating with customers and influencers? How often do you blog, Tweet, Flickr, comment, Podcast, upload videos, etc? This is an important success metric to track. Over time, you can connect this active conversation with social networks to increased sales.

Success Tip #3: Reduce Costs
As a social media marketing consultant, time after time I’ve seen companies get more excited about the great social media tools out there than in finding ways to connect with customers to reduce costs. But reducing costs is one of the prime success metrics social media can provide for you. How do you start?

Start down the path of reducing costs by empowering your customers: 

• Create an open community where customers can support each other and reduce your internal customer service costs.
• Learn from your customers – some of your most innovative ideas can come from listening to your customers.
• Reduce your advertising costs. Tell your story to customers and encourage them to share it with others. Be compelling and open or it won’t work.
• Focus on long-term metrics. Successful campaigns often extend for a year or more where the pay-offs are more clearly shown.

Success Tip #4: Measure Your Website Analytics
My opinion is that social media is the next generation of search engine optimization. So I always encourage companies to think in those terms, and consider these analytics:

• Search engine ranking
• Social bookmarking activity
• Video/podcast views/listens
• Inbound links
• Technorati rankings
• Blog trackbacks
• RSS subscriptions
• Blog comments on your blog
• Active commenting on complimentary blogs
• Visitors (first-time and repeat)
• Visitor paths
• Referrers

 Website analytics tools are more sophisticated and helpful the more clearly you’ve defined your objectives. Some of the most popular are: HubSpot Tools, Google Analytics, Omniture, WebTrends and Core Metrics.

Success Tip #5: Convert Conversations Into Leads
As you’ve heard often, customers are talking about your brand online whether you like it or not. Your risk of inaction is to ignore the conversation. Your return on investment will come when you engage these customers. Your conversations must provide value and be personable.

For instance, on Twitter both Starbucks and Whole Foods share customer comments, local specials, and ask customers what their favorite items are. It’s casual and open, yet subtly appeals to the attractiveness of the brand. Check out some of the brands on Twitter, and implement some of their conversation techniques. Use tracking codes whenever possible.

Measuring social media marketing performance is vital for your long-term success. For your next social media campaign, try implementing these 5 success metrics into your strategy. You’ll have more focus and a better handle on the time and resources your put into social media. Best of all, you’ll strengthen your brand and help incite greater customer loyalty and sales.

Danny has a great story, has a dream of becoming a physical therapist, and our support can help him achieve that dream with $100k from Wells Fargo. I’m also really proud to support the causes being helped by this contest. One of the causes you can support is Jr Achievement. A turning point in my life was when I was invited to join Jr Achievement in middle school. It really opened up my dreams to be an entrepreneur. From the site:

“Junior Achievement helps young people become economically empowered. The volunteer-driven, K-12 programs uses hands-on learning to teach students how to be work-ready, entrepreneurial, and financially literate.”

Jr. Achievement is my preferred cause, and I encourage you to check out the other causes and vote for your favorite. The other 2 causes you can support via this contest are Habitat for Humanity and Boys and Girls Clubs of America.

The Tweetups have been a great way to connect in real life, and I’m really looking forward to seeing old friends and meeting new Twitter users at the Tweetup tonight. It also feels great to know we can use social media for more than simply connecting in person - we can actually provide genuine support for those who need it most.

I hope to see you there tonight.

Tweetup Details: Salt Lake City Roasting Company tonight
Address: 320 E. 400 S
How to Find Us: We’ll meet upstairs again
Agenda: Meet some great fellow Utah Twitter users, and learn about some great causes you can help support.  

If you have any trouble finding the Tweetup or any of the attendees, message me on Twitter @ghennipher

“Social media strategy should tie to business and communication strategy, rather than being based on the available tools. But it is not possible to develop a social media strategy without at least having an understanding of the various tools that are available, their functionality and purposes, and the kinds of audiences and conversations for which they might be best suited.” - Joel Postman, Principal Socialized PR

I don’t usually give a lot of time on this blog to social media tools, simply because their coolness tends to distract marketers from basic business objectives for their social media campaigns. The thing to always remember is that social media is simply a medium (albeit exciting & effective) to help your company meet it’s basic business/revenue goals.

As Joel Postman points out above, social media needs to tie into business & communication strategy to be truly effective for your company. Social media tools should not be used for the express purpose of: being more transparent, being conversational in the blogosphere, online visibility, or any other goal not specifically business process and/or revenue related. Of course, by now, you know all of these things are important. Yet to focus on them independent of the reason you’re in business spells disaster. Your likely end goal should be to boost your overall business revenue, streamline your business process, etc. Strategic use of social media tools - with success metrics attached to each implementation - is one of the most solid ways for your company to meet foundational business goals.

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.

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!

SLC Tweetup

Please join us for our third Salt Lake City Tweetup event Wednesday, September 10 at 7:00 pm. We will gather at the Salt Lake City Roasting Company again to enjoy some offline socializing and business networking. This is the monthly meeting of Salt Lake City-area Twitter users. Come meet up with your fellow Twitter addicts and don’t forget your mobile phone to Tweet the event.

More Details -

Tweetup at Salt Lake City Roasting Company

Address: 320 E. 400 S

How to Find Us: We’ll meet upstairs.

Agenda: Meet fellow Utah twitter users, share twitter experiences, have a great time.  This time we’ll have a special guest. @marismith  (Mari Smith) author of Facebook for Professionals will be joining us. Please come and help welcome her to Utah, and spend some time informally chatting about using Facebook for business.

If you have any trouble finding the Tweetup or any of the attendees, DM me on Twitter @ghennipher.

Twitter Palin Peak

Twitter has seen much media coverage lately, particularly during heavy usage periods like the Gustav and Hannah hurricanes and of course, during the nation’s nomination of it’s highest elected officials. Seems that even the most respectable and resistant users have finally come aboard and are actively tweeting.

A couple of days ago the Twitter blog posted an image (shown above) which shows the dramatic increase of tweets per second that occurred during Governor Palin’s speech. The news media is all abuzz over the seemingly exponential growth of Twitter users, but this rate of growth was designed into Twitter’s architecture.

Twitter is a platform engineered upon the “viral expansion loop” concept. This concept, when done right, virtually guarantees self-replication – because that’s really all a “viral expansion loop” is, a system that naturally doubles and triples and quadruples till its much bigger than anyone ever expected. Because these systems typically start small, the media tend to dismiss them as a a great idea that no one cares about. Also, very typically, the media have to go back and eat their words in 12 or 18 months when these platforms have replicated to the point that they can no longer be ignored. That’s certainly the case with Twitter.

Now that Twitter is being taken seriously in mainstream media because of the elegant way it helps users broadcast what’s going on in their world, the media’s surprise is certainly laughable. Necessarily Twitter will have peaks during times of nationwide interest, such as the RNC. But Twitter’s increased uptime has helped it to manage this predictable boost in tweets per second on its servers.

Twitter is built on a viral expansion platform – it was designed specifically to exploit viral loops. Why the surprise? Any ideas?