While some will use this as an example of the overall dangers of getting an organization involved in social media, it is pretty clear that the real danger is not getting involved enough.  Had McNeil/Motrin been more involved, they might well have either avoided the mistake made in the advertisement, or at least quickly turned it around before too much damage had been done.  Here’s how the whole thing could have been different, had Motrin been actively engaging their target audience through social media before the ad was even a twinkle in their eye:

1. Customer Knowledge - Had Motrin been engaging their customers before producing the ad, they might have better known their customers (particularly the social media-savvy ones who might be the first to see an online video) and their potential hot spots around maternal topics.  For example, they might have realized that there are a number of moms out there who do use motrin regularly, but who who do not like the associated stigma that they aren’t fully embracing natural health practices – a stigma that is tickled pretty directly in the video with regard to methods for carrying a baby.
2. Customer Trust – Once the video was released, an engaged customer community might have been a bit more willing to give the benefit of the doubt to Motrin.  That is to say, if these moms had already been using social media (blogs, Twitter, etc)  to communicate with the folks at Motrin, they might have had more trust that the folks at Motrin must not have intended the video to mean what it appeared to mean.  As it happened, there was no prior engagement of customers and therefore no built up trust.  As a result, moms assumed the worst.
3. Customer Channel - Diplomats know that, for international relationships to work, a country must keep “open channels of communication” with other countries.  The relationship between organizations and their customers is no different.  Let’s say that Motrin had been actively engaging the digital community of 500 Moms through Twitter and a blog (two of the major channels used against Motrin after the ad release) for the six months prior to the release of the ad.  And let’s assume that the ad was released, and that it did make moms angry, and that Motrin realized it after the fact.  First of all, there is a good chance that one of their community of 500 Moms might tell them directly and immediately through social media.  But perhaps more importantly, once Motrin did realize the mistake, they would very quickly be able to ping their community of 500 with an explanation or an apology.  As it happened Motrin’s only recourse (since they did not have a pre-existing customer community) was to post a very stuffed-shirt, legal-looking response on their home page 3 days into the controversy.

There is a fantastic lesson here for any organization considering the potential return on their social media investment.  While much of that ROI may come in the form of enhancing the brand image and awareness and therefore increasing sales, another dimension to that ROI may be in the ability to build knowledge, trust and open channels with customers which can help to prevent runaway public relations disasters.

1. Social media marketing requires decentralization
2. Decentralization requires literacy
3. Social media are (generally) less expensive

Let’s go a little deeper into these three, shall we?

1. Social media marketing requires decentralization

Because social media is built on personal relationships between real people, brands hoping to engage their customers there will have to play by those rules.  But personal relationships require real interactions with real people – which takes a lot more person-power than shooting a broadcast commercial or sending out a flyer.  It may therefore be necessary to get more than just the marketing department involved in reaching out to customers.  Online shoe retailer Zappos.com, for example, empowers every one of their customer service people to use Twitter and YouTube (notice that the people in the video are not marketers) to reach out to customers.  This is not only a customer service function, but ends up being a powerful marketing tool as well, as those interactions build the Zappos brand through word of mouth.  The page of Zappos Twitter users bears this out as well, where Zappos_George, their customer loyalty person, is only the 5th most active “Twitterer,” behind the CEO, the HR director, and the COO.

2. Decentralization requires literacy

The more any organization decentralizes, the smarter its people have to be.  This isn’t just true in marketing.  Montesquieu says in the famous political treatise The Spirit of Laws
that “It is in a republican government that the whole power of education is required.”  To translate: when you give power to the society, that society needs to know how to use that power. Similarly, in order to empower employees outside of the marketing department to use social media effectively, an organization needs to ensure that they have a certain level of social media literacy.  They will need to know how to use the tools, how to respond to customer criticism, and what sorts of norms need to be adhered to in social online communities.  Zappos.com famously uses part of their initial training hours to get their people up to speed on how to use Twitter.

3. Social media are (generally) less expensive

Because customers can (and oftentimes should) be engaged on free/inexpensive sites like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc., the information technology costs involved are, by traditional standards, extremely low.  As an example, despite their sizable marketing budget, Dell Computers makes extensive use of the free Twitter platform, as does Southwest Airlines, Comcast and many other large companies.  As a result, the money which may otherwise have been sunk into building an expensive web presence can be shifted instead toward human investments in the education of, and time spent by, the people who engage customers through those platforms.

So to recap, for organizations to really engage customers through social media, they will have to question many of the assumptions on which they’ve built their marketing models over the past few years, and begin to consider human capital investment.  These will probably take the form of social media literacy education on all levels, and then the encouragement to use social media as a part of every job function.

Original Photos: Jacob Bøtter