Case 2

Motrin Moms Rebel

The History: Motrin decided that it would be smart to launch a social media campaign for International Baby Wearing Week by producing a well-made YouTube video. However, they didn't anticipate the backlash. Moms were not pleased with babies being made into fashion statements and Motrin got an earful from the Internet community.
The ads we launched on Tuesday September 30, 2008 – by Sunday the ads had been pulled and Johnson and Johnson had posted an apology on their website. In the 10 days after the launch of this disastrous foray into Social Media J&J lost 20% of its market value.

On the surface at least, the company accomplished the ultimate in outreach goals:
1. They did reach their target audience
2. They did get them to engage in dialogue about their brand
3. They did find a way to track their message and outreach

While the ads were the number one discussion trend on the Twitter, the debacle became known as the great big “Fail Whale”. And it is doubtful that Johnson & Johnson was happy that while Motrin was the most active discussion on Social Media for those days the sentiment was entirely negative. 

The dialogue (and overwhelming outrage) grew exponentially. Within hours of the ad launching, there were thousands of Twitter comments and almost all are negative with many saying they will no longer use the brand name product.

The driving force of the conflict was mostly people talking on Twitter, which generated news coverage on a slow day, which caused people on Twitter to discuss it more.  The news coverage was what created the momentum, but the discussion on Twitter is what started it and gave journalists something to write about.

The Lesson: Motrin was overwhelmed by the Social Media universe’s backlash. Motrin was not proactively paying attention. Understand your audience before engaging with it.
Had Motrin done some research, it probably would have anticipated such a backlash. People don’t mess around when you talk about their kids.

Also, People go to search when an issue breaks out - On the 16th and 17th, when the story hit the mainstream press, searches on the phrase "motrin" spiked on Google.  Here's a graph of how people's searches on Motrin (and as a baseline, Tylenol and Aspirin) during the time period in question.

 

Search engine optimization cannot protect you – in a situation like this, you would hope that having scrubbed and pushed all the bad things out of your Google results would save you, and that over time, it might become problematic if your crisis continues.

During the 48 hours of coverage, we examined Google's search results on the core brand, "Motrin".  We found that although the results did not reflect the conflict, Google was interspersing search results from news items, which most certainly were tainted.  In fact even today a search on Motrin reveals a news story embedded within the top 10.  Though keeping an eye on your Google results is important, you cannot depend on it to be a firewall in a crisis.

Social Canary Value Proposition: Utilizing Social Canary to create information out of clutter would have saved Johnson & Johnson a nasty headache. Even before that, using Social Canary to measure trial marketing campaigns would have saved Johnson and Johnson aches and pains.