Social media enthusiasts of the world often unite in the wake of internet riots with the “I told you so” speech and blog postings (present company included) about how a company or brand should have reacted to a social media meltdown. The latest debacle was made possible by Motrin with this :30 spot. 

Problem: You’ve alienated your target demographic

The speed at which a big brand like Motrin reacted was decent. Rumblings started over the weekend and by Monday afternoon, Motrin had this announcement posted on the homepage of its website (although several hours after the entire motrin.com site was not available):

Not sure what’s distasteful about the ad? Read the coverage:

http://blogs.forbes.com/sciencebizblog/2008/11/twitter-moms-si.html

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/11/17/motrin-mothers-groundswell-by-the-numbers/

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/motrin_bows_to_social_media_pr.php

How can this type of situation be prevented in the future?

In short, it can’t be 100% prevented. At the end of the day, even the best processes and procedures can fail and its why we live in a world of product recalls and warranty repairs. Dealing with a negative reaction to an advertising campaign is similar to a massive product recall — it’s all in how you react to the problem.

How should I react to an internet riot?

I jokingly refer to these types of situations as “internet riots” however I realize they are to be taken seriously otherwise they will spiral out of control — much like a riot.

While mommy bloggers certainly rallied and voiced their opinion to Motrin via blogs, twitter, and other outlets, we have to remember that there are other types of visitors to the site — visitors who, like me, had never seen the commercial and had no idea what “everybody was mad about” this morning.

Plastering an announcement on the homepage of the site is probably “good enough,” but not ideal. Here’s why the Motrin execution falls short:

1. The entire homepage announcement is an image and not text. This means Google and other search engines cannot index the contents of the image. This then means the message will not be searchable on search engines. As of this writing, “motrin moms” (the ad campaign’s main message) dominates search results and motrin.com is nowhere to be found.
2. The message on the homepage is not clickable — it doesn’t take me to more information on the product, status on when the rest of the campaign will be disabled, or even a way to contact Motrin.
3. How long will this message stay on their homepage? What if we need to refer to it at a later date after the initial groundswell as died down?

Instead, the following steps would have been much easier and faster to produce and maintain on an on-going basis:

1. Post a blog posting containing detailed information on what the problem is, what you’re doing to fix it, and make sure to have keywords in the article that are found in the referenced blog posts, tweets, and articles (no need to involve IT or web developers to update the site)
2. Link to the post on the homepage of the Motrin site (so it can be later removed without eliminating the content of the article!)
3. Post a tweet on twitter to the channel of the dialogue with a link to the blog posting
4. Openly accept comments (I like the reference to the feedback, although there’s no mechanism to contact Motrin from this message on their homepage)

What can I do to monitor whether or not a riot is brewing?

In late 2006 I outlined some common ways to monitor your brand online via this post. If you find a site that is not RSS-enabled, you can also monitor it with a service such as this.

Help “steer the ship”

Posting content to your own site and managing comments on it can help you “steer the ship.” The last thing you want is a situation like Motrin’s that continues to spiral out of control with blog entries and tweets that carry a negative connotation about the product or brand name. By funneling all attention about the issue (good or bad) through a blog post our your website, you now function as the central source of information.

I came across IntenseDebate.com today and am extremely impressed as well as excited about this new service. The service provides blog owners the ability to install a plug-in on their blog which will centralize the storage of blog commenting, streamline comment threading, improve comment moderation, and encourage additional posting.

The problem I run into a lot when reading blogs is while I’d like to take the time to comment, I’m busy, and don’t often want to create a new account to post a simply reply. Plus, when posting in an established community and without “street cred”, it’s hard to feel like you’re adding value to a conversation if you’ve never posted before.

IntenseDebate.com changes this. As an end-user, I now have a centralized account and any blog that uses IntenseDebate.com for their commenting system, I can automatically comment and my profile on IntenseDebate.com will be shown, as well as other posts on other blogs I’ve made via my IntenseDebate.com account. It’s really quite impressive.

I’ll post a few quick comments below to display how it works.

It’s fairly easy to cost-effectively monitor your brand names and trademarked terms (and anything else you’d like to keep tabs on) using Google’s Blog search RSS feeds (and several other aggregator service RSS feeds). When you don’t have the funds (or a low volume of online/blog conversations pertaining to your brand) for a service like BuzzLogic or BuzzMetrics, it’s about as “grass roots” as you can get.

But what if you want to automatically monitor changes to your competitors’ websites that don’t have feeds built into them?

Page2RSS is the answer.

Page2RSS is a free service which creates an RSS feed out of any URL you enter into the site. Their free service creates a cached version of the page every 4 hours. Simply subscribe to the RSS feed and off you go — be the first to know when your competitors update their homepage, product pages within their sites, and so on.

This is surely making the rounds, but I wanted to draw attention to customer service with humor as demonstrated by Google Transit’s Joe Hughes. This is such a great way to give a large company a human touch, particularly with the sense of humor. The PR/buzz surrounding this is also going to be an added bonus.

While Friday still remains at SES NY ’07, it feels like today (Thursday) was the last day. I sat in on several sessions all of which were focused around retail, search, advertising, and social media. The underlying theme of the day was looking at advertising from multiple angles and how it can help build/elevate your brand. My notes from the day are very scattered so I’ll do a recap with my own thoughts as well.

Online SEM Channel Strategy – What to do?
As I evaluate our online channel and the fact that it is like the Wild West right now, I am presented with the following dilemma:

1. As a manufacturer, we want to protect our brand name. In fact, leveraging our brand is a corporate initiative, and it should be a differentiator when people shop for blinds and shades online or offline.
2. Our products are sold in different channels: Big Box, Independent, and Online. Online presents the biggest challenge because our brand name is used to drive traffic to competitor websites. This is an easy problem to fix thanks to our legal department. However, the more interesting and complex issue is how to work with our online retail partners to get a win-win situation: we want to “own” our brand name, yet our retail partners need to advertise our brand name. What’s a consumer to do?

I don’t have all of the answers yet, but have some ideas (which I will not discuss here). The more important point is that we have retail partners who are advertising our brand name, essentially free of charge. In the blind and shade industry, brand names are either very well known, or completely nonexistent. It’s really a hit-or-miss vertical. With that said, once you start rolling in banner advertising, offline advertising, PR, social media marketing, etc. to create that brand awareness, then the online retailer SEM takes a whole different role.

Where does SEM live in the sales/conversion funnel?
There are essentially two types of searchers:

1. Consumer searches for a specific product name (sometimes including a brand name)
2. Consumer searches for generic product name

Consumers who fall into bucket #1 are further along in the sales funnel. They have been pre-disposed to your product and are more or less “in the market” now and ready to spend their money. I would argue that these consumers represent an “easier” conversion to a sale and that your SEM budget should focus heavily in this area.
Is SEM a marketing tool or a sales tool?
Consumers who fall into bucket #2 are the people who blur the lines of SEM. Is SEM a marketing tool or a sales tool? Or is it both? People using generic search terms may not have a brand top-of-mind, but if they see advertisements relating to their search that mention a brand name, they may be more likely to resonate with those ads. This is particularly true if you have other advertising and marketing in place such as banners, offline ads, PR, good social media penetration, etc. Now, combine the power of the “stickiness” of brand advertising with the online retailers who also sell our products and we’ve got an interesting situation.

Generic terms may not immediately convert, but they may be attributed to future conversions
The problem is that it’s hard to tie sales to generic search terms. They may not immediately convert, simply because the consumer falls a little higher in the sales conversion funnel and may not be ready to purchase right then and there. Unfortunately for us, too, the sales cycle is much longer for custom blinds and shades (due to ordering samples online, waiting for them to arrive, and also because of the higher price point of custom products).

Who’s to say, though, that a generic term didn’t ultimately drive the consumer towards purchasing your product at a later date. What if they came back to the search engine, looked for another term or even used your brand name this time in their search phrase, and ended up purchasing on your site (or retail partner site)? It’s certainly doable to keep track of the initial click or keyword/phrase that drove the consumer to your website for the first time. But it’s also very hard to measure the effectiveness of SEM with other “outside’ influencers such as more traditional advertising.

Fortunately, I will be able to run a baseline test of SEM for 1 to 2 quarters without any other external advertising (other than normal monthly promotions, etc. that we would normally run). I anticipate a lift when SEM begins to clicks to our website (and hopefully sales through retail partners), but even more so do I expect this when we start advertising via more traditional means. I will really be interested to see if it drives a higher conversion rate on the same SEM campaigns I had been running.

It’s hard to say, but fortunately I have tools like Omniture SiteCatalyst and WebTrends Dynamic Search to help me manage it all.

Creating the right blend of advertising – avoiding advertising silos
The ultimate goal is to create the right blend of advertising so SEM is converting at its highest possible rate when balanced with the correct amount of banner advertising, offline advertising, PR, social media, etc. I think the main problem with advertisers today is that they are looking at everything in silos. PR is measured in impressions — but how is it correlated with sales? Banner ads are measured in impressions, click-throughs, and conversions — but how do banners influence search? How does leverage social media influence customer satisfaction and repeat business?

There are so many variables that go into the marketing, management, and maintenance of a brand. Pile this responsibility on top of having to actually creating, produce, and maintain new product development and you’ve got your hands full.  Do it well and you’ve got a well-oiled machine with new product development and marketing playing off each other. Do it poorly, and you’ll find yourself in a very disconnected business with poorly performing sales funnels and weak innovation and new product development.