Are you still trying to convince your management why your brand should be monitoring Social Media? Well if you are a Consumer Packaged Good brand (or any brand really), just look at what happened to Motrin over the past couple of days and the reaction of Motrin Moms.
A simple search on Twitter of #motrinmoms will show you that they pissed off one hell of a lot of people with their latest ad around “babywearing.” Mommy Bloggers are not people you want to mess with and you sure better understand the sandbox you are playing in if you do them wrong. For instance, just look at this Consumer Generated Media that has already popped up in response. Not exactly brand content you want at the top of search results.
The Lesson for Brand Managers:
Motrin screwed up. It happens. But in today’s world of Social Media, the place they really screwed up was in not monitoring what people were saying about the brand. This PR disaster is happening underneath their nose and no one on the brand is responding. Not their advertising agency, not their Public Relations group and not the brand itself. The unfortunate fact is that company’s haven’t trained Brand Managers to respond quickly to situations like this. That needs to change….and it needs to change fast.
People are going to be talking about your brand, with or without the Brand Manager’s permission. This simple fact is reason enough that you should be monitoring the conversations around your brand. Motrin is just the latest brand to learn this lesson the hard way.
UPDATE - Well it looks like Motrin is trying to respond. If you commented on their website, it looks like their VP of Marketing has a response that is being sent out (Thanks to Amy Gates for the lead). And the Motrin.com site has been taken down for now, but thanks to the power of YouTube, you can still see the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmykFKjNpdYBill Seaver) (Thanks
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