Fine Print

This past weekend Motrin released a controversial commercial that a lot of mom bloggers found offensive — an issue they naturally took to Twitter. Suffice to say, it’s not been a good Monday for Motrin’s PR department.

People are commenting on how the company has screwed up by not doing its market research more thoroughly in the first place to anticipate such a huge — and possibly — long-lasting negative reaction to its product alignment with new moms. The bigger issue is why a lot of people didn’t realize this groundswell of protest was building at the weekend until it was too late to engage those bloggers? It seems that Motrin wasn’t monitoring them properly.

Companies will always make mistakes online (human beings run them after all) but it’s how they recover that will be the real social media trial by fire.

~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada (Twitter: johncarson)