Managing Motrin Moms
posted by Alex MillerWednesday, November 19th, 2008
By now, most people in the online world are aware of the recent “fiasco” surround Motrin’s new online ad about mothers who carry their babies on a continual basis. Last Friday, Motrin posted an ad on their Web site featuring the voice of a young mother talking about the pain caused by carrying her baby in a pouch or sling. It was quickly noticed by mommy bloggers who immediately started tweeting and blogging about it, spreading the word throughout the community. The first Tweet on the subject was posted on Saturday evening, and within a few hours angry moms made hundreds of posts on the topic – all conveniently aggregated by the #MotrinMoms hashtag. The mothers were angered for several reasons including:
- The implication that baby-carrying is a fashion and that the mother’s who do it are doing so to look “like an official mom.”
- The trivialization of baby-carrying: The ad repeatedly refers to the “supposed” benefit of carrying your baby as opposed the documented and widely accepted belief.
- That mothers who carry their babies look “crazy.”
Plenty of other bloggers have written about this topic, including Peter Shankman and Lisa Belkin, and their posts have covered much of what Motrin did wrong here. Personally, my biggest problem with the ad is how poorly written it is; in addition to being offensive to many mothers, the language is poorly chosen and does not make much sense, nor does it reach a real point. However, I think there is one aspect that hasn’t been fully addressed: the lack of integration of marketing, PR, and communications professionals into the social networks they are targeting.
As I watched the Motrin controversy unfold most of the day Sunday, one thing became apparent to me: Motrin representatives were nowhere to be found. Not only did the Motrin response not come until the end of the day on Monday, but the ad wasn’t even pulled off the site until Monday afternoon. To me, this says that nobody from the Motrin PR/marketing team (or their agency) was actively engaging the Twitter community – if they had been they would have seen the controversy unfolding much earlier, and been able to respond faster. As the use of social networks in PR campaigns has grown more accepted, the number of campaigns has dramatically increased, as have the number of campaigns being run by people who are not a part of, and do not understand, the networks they are targeting. Too many companies simply log on to Twitter, create an account, post a couple Tweets, and think that they are done.
A truly effective social media campaign requires that the people running it are actually a part of the community they are working with. The entire Digital Lifestyle Team here at Zeno manage their own blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Digg accounts – and use them everyday. This allows us to stay connected and to better understand the communities we work with – this also allows us to identify and confront issues before they grow into something biger. In the last three months alone, I can count at least five instances where we found blogs or tweets where the author had complained about an issue with a client’s product – we immediately contacted our client’s customer service team and directed them to the author and were able to resolve the situation before most of the community were aware of the problem.
Hopefully, as social media becomes more engrained in our profession, we will see more people truly integrate themselves with the communities, instead of doing the bare minimum. Unfortunately, it may take several more high profile incidents like MotrinMoms for companies (and agencies) to realize the benefit of using people who truly understand and are part of these networks.
For a great idea on how to introduce your office to some of the social media tools we use everyday, check out Andrea Nowack’s post on her “Social Media Scavenger Hunt”
November 20th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Agree with everything you’ve written. These companies have to get hip to social media or incidents like this will continue to crop up. They can’t ignore what’s going on online anymore.
November 24th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
This is a really well-written post and I agree with what you say, Alex. Interestingly, now there’s been some online chatter from people who believe Motrin may have done this intentionally to get people talking about the product. While I don’t necessarily agree with that (there IS such a thing as “bad PR” after all), there’s something to be said for the fact that the Motrin name is all over the place. Regardless of the negativity surrounding this controversy among mommy bloggers, from a strict awareness perspective this could almost be considered somewhat of a success.