Oh Twitter, You Are the Kindling For the Flame War

November 17, 2008 By Leave a Comment

You’ve probably all heard about/taken part in the latest cute marketing idea gone wrong….the Twitter Motrin Moms fiasco (#motrinmoms if you’re searching).

As a mom, and a mom who wore my baby (and still do when a stroller just isn’t convenient) I took no offense to the ad. I thought it was cute. But I can see how some would be offended by it.

I’m not going to spend time here debating whether or not Motrin did something wrong or dissecting the ad for its political and social correctness. What I am more interested in is the firestorm it sparked on Twitter…

Its a true testament to the effectiveness of social media. 5 years ago the ad would have come out, sparked few hundred one-on-one calls to the company, maybe a hand written petition to remove the ad from print and television, and may have been mentioned in a few telephone calls across the country. Now though, with the popularity of social media, the whole world gets to have a look inside the suggestion box, and the complaints to Motrin are fodder for more, and more, and more complaints.

Sure, a few people are “defending” Motrin, saying what’s the big deal, really. But those few don’t mean anything against the throngs of seething moms out there.

So what can we learn from Motrin’s mistake?

  • Number one: know your audience.  That should go without saying.
  • Number two: if you think your ad might piss someone off, tone it down, pull it, or only publish it to the groups you know will appreciate the questionable humor.
  • Number three: this is a good one, so pay attention. Utilize social media to your advantage. Obviously, it works. Unfortunately for Motrin, it worked against them. Find something your customers can rally around and apply it (positively) to your product.

I only wish I worked for Tylenol right now. What a great campaign you could build around this story. Not only is Tylenol safe for pregnant and breastfeeding women, they have the opportunity to step in and look like the winners in this situation. To say they do not condone pill popping and would never label the moms that use their products. But they do understand that sometimes you need a little relief, no matter who you are.

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Ideas, Such Big Ideas

November 14, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Finally, I have a bit of time to catch up on my notes from Dreamforce.

So my two favorite sessions at Dreamforce focused on Salesforce Ideas and Facebook.

Ideas and Force.com Sites

The Ideas session was led by the owners of the Ideas projects at Dell (Vida Killian) and Starbucks (Matthew Guiste). Both Dell and Starbucks use force.com sites to expose the Ideas API. They each gave a run down of how they use Ideas to deliver the features/products their customers want and how they moderate their Ideas sites. Here’s an overview of what we learned from them

  • Be prepared for an onslaught of Ideas when you first roll it out. Have plenty of moderators ready to resond to Ideas and put out fires when necessary.
  • Be prepared for negative feedback through Ideas. Its going to happen. Not everyone loves everything about your products to death and wants to snuggle up with them every night. Take the negative feedback, respond to it in a constructive way, and turn it into a conversation about how you can make your customers happier.
  • Expect a huge drop-off in activity on your Ideas site after the initial wave. Just keep responding to the ideas that do come in and folks will come back.
  • Keep a blog on the site that talks about what ideas are being implemented and give Kudos to the people who submitted them.
  • Encourage social networking with your ideas. When you integrate Ideas with Facebook, whole communities read the news that the people they know are submitting and voting on Ideas.

And speaking of Facebook, that provides a nice seguay to the next session.

Kingsley Joseph and Clara Shih of Salesforce talk about Social Media Marketing with Twitter, Facebook, and Blogs.

Kingsley’s role at Salesforce is to try to bring their marketing into the social realm. These guys covered so much ground, you really just need to watch the session to catch everything. Here’s an overview though

  • Keep up with the metrics related to social marketing and your brand. It can be difficult to do, but its important to try to measure the effects and stay on top of trends.
  • Use social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, and blogs to get your name out in the social networks.
  • Try Facebook ads to get your ads infront of targeted audiences.
  • Use Salesfore business applications on Facebook.
  • Distribute info about your product/brand virally.
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