social media: November 2008 Archives
Last week, an ad for Motrin pain reliever targeting mothers created a firememe. Adage.com documents how the fire started, with some alpha bloggers posting and then taking the story to Twitter, where it lit up the service on Saturday and Sunday. You can also use search.twitter.com to view the activity on Twitter. Here's a nice graph of the chatter, courtesy of the Jeremiah Owyang.
Long story short, the ad came down and McNeil Consumer Healthcare apologized.
I won't spend much time on the controversy. My guess is that the agency on the Motrin account, Ajax, didn't do any research. I showed the ad to a roomful of college students unfamiliar with the controversy, and they identified five copy points that marginalized the first-person mom of the narrative. Not exactly a smart strategy.
Were the mommys who criticized the ad out of line? It doesn't matter. They did it because they hated the ad and had the tools to complain and effect change.
That's life today. And that's the lesson of this post.
On Monday morning, after a weekend of anti-Motrin chatter, I did a Google search and found no evidence of it. (regretfully, I didn't do a screen grab). On Tuesday morning, there were a couple of references, from "news" at the top and from blogs on the bottom. That's all. If you were a McNeil executive and did this, you would be blissfully unaware of any unhappy customers.
If this is all you do for personal or brand surveillance, it's not enough. There's a wall that separates traditional Internet use and social media use, and it used to be that most people stayed on the traditional side. Today, there's a mass audience on the social side. So you need to monitor both - one more slow moving, the other, lighting fast.
Here are some basic suggestions:
- If you're not currently using RSS to monitor the blogosphere, you need to. Stat.
- Ditto, RSS for monitoring searches from Google, Google blogs and other relevant search engines.
- You should monitor Backtype for blog comments.
- You should monitor Technorati.
- And for heaven's sake, get on Twitter, participate, and learn about his unique culture.
Two more points. Your brand needs a "safety valve" for disgruntled stakeholders (why is no one "gruntled" these days?). If you have a social media presence, they can bring their comments to you, where you can participate, listen, act on suggestions and defuse the controversy. Note: it's also good to hear from happy stakeholders. Here are some websites where smart companies facilitate communication with their customers:
If you can't create a site like these, don't worry. A well-written blog - one written by a real human in a real voice - should serve you well. Once you've created the blog, feed it, create relationships and participate in the social chatter.
Second, you need to monitor your reputation 24/7/365. The Internet never sleeps. Accept it and adapt. If people are mad at you, you don't want to give them a four hour head start.
Social media are at a tipping point. Moving forward, you can't afford to not be in the game. You can't afford to not have a plan. Staying out? That can give you one big headache.
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What listening tools and strategies do you recommend?
Just one day after the election, Josh Bernoff challenged Barack Obama to use the groundswell:
I call on president-elect Obama to create a community of committed Americans to discuss the solutions to the problems that face us. I call on him to designate a US Community Manager, with a small staff, to moderate and harvest those discussions to solve the country's problems. Forget polls. With a few million people in my.america.gov, Obama will be able to tap into the world's largest focus group. Communities are cheap, compared to most of what the government does. Create a space for the brightest people you know; use them to attract the best ideas. And better yet, use this energized community to sell those ideas to America.
A day later, Obama answered the challenge with change.gov, a social media site, to create engagement in the transition process.
On the site, you can read Obama's transition blog, upload your vision for the future (with images), apply for a job and learn more about Obama's policies and transition team.
A hint of things to come? You can join the site by providing your email address and zip code. No doubt Obama will take direct engagement to the people to a new level. That's one of the hallmarks of the social media campaign that propelled him into office.
Yet another way that our President-elect is using social media to tell his story: Obama put his election photos on Flickr under Creative Commons license.
Read more about the creation of change.gov at Mashable and ReadWriteWeb.
Barack Obama climbed almost insurmountable odds in his bid to become our next president. As candidates go, he was inexperienced. He had to face down a powerful opponent - Hillary Clinton - and then maintain momentum against the Republican machine and John McCain. His race was undoubtably a negative for some voters.
To be sure, Obama is a gifted and charismatic speaker. And Bush's dismal failures made America ready for change.
But Obama won because he ran an expert campaign. I think it's the largest and most successful social media campaign ever. Through it, he engaged voters and raised an unprecedented amount of money.
I attended an Obama event in March, and my name and email address entered the campaign system. After that, I received timely - almost daily - messages from the campaign. They were personalized, relevant, and tactically addressed issues as they arose. Each missive included an easy way to donate, and encouraged even modest contributions. Multiply that by the millions who engaged with Obama, and you've got a genuine groundswell of social equity.
Make note of these names: David Axelrod, chief strategist. And David Plouffe, campaign manager. These are the geniuses who led Obama to victory.
Learn more about how they did it: Todd Defren's post on Plouffe, the CMO of the Obama campaign. And Mike Chapman, of FG Squared, on how MyBarackObama.com served as home base for engagement in the campaign.
Posts like these will have to hold you until someone writes a book documenting the strategy and tactics that elected Obama. That will be THE book about the 2008 presidential election.
