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Looking back, Motrin ad pain worsened by not fully embracing social media
By Justin Goldsborough | November 17th, 2008
Justin case you were wondering…I’ve been saying for a while now that if you don’t get social media, your brand reputation just might get it. Getting it, in this sense, isn’t good, and Johnson & Johnson got it this weekend.
If you haven’t heard the story by now, check the hash tag #motrinmoms on Twitter or Google “johnson and johnson twitter.” JNJ created a viral YouTube video to promote one of its products. I get that. The video, which insinuated that babywearing devices leave moms in need of Motrin to handle the back pain struck a chord with mothers and prompted them to tweet their mind. I get that too.
Here’s what I don’t get. Why did JNJ take so long to join the conversation? The controversy started Friday, hit a boiling point Saturday and Sunday and yet JNJ waited to blog its apology until today on jnjbtw.com, a blog site the company has been posting to since at least June 2007. Huh???
What’s the point of having a blog site if you aren’t going to use it to tell your side of the story. Did the JNJ execs really sit in meetings over the weekend discussing how to respond and no one suggested a blog post? That’s like getting together with a group of friends to watch a game, wanting to order a pizza, staring at a phone on the table and then hopping in the car, heading to the pizza place and ordering a large pepperoni in person.
From the outside looking in, this seems like a classic case of “toe-in-the-water” syndrome. Companies go toe-in-the-water with technology all the time. A YouTube video here, a podcast there, here a tweet, there a tweet, and so on. This strategy gives the impression that a company’s on the cutting edge, trying new things, when really all they’re to do is look the part.
Generally what happens with toe-in-the-water tactics is you have a few people championing change management, but leadership hasn’t thrown its collective hat in the ring. This makes it very hard to respond quickly when an issue arises. In this case, why would JNJ execs make the effort to respond fast if they didn’t fully understand the word-of-mouth-on-steroids that is Twitter and the blogosphere?
Now, you might think I’m being presumptuous. I’ve never worked at JNJ and I don’t know Kathy Widmer, the McNeil Consumer Healthcare marketing VP whose apology currently graces the motrin.com home page. But here’s what I do know:
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This is the first post on the site I can find from Widmer. That tells me blogging wasn’t a top of mind solution for her.
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Widmer’s blog post was titled McNeil meets Twitter - we hear you. While Widmer may have heard the complaints, I don’t think she or anyone else from McNeil has actually met Twitter. In fact, I haven’t seen one JNJ rep on Twitter, which is where the conversation about the video started. There’s something to be said for apologizing or addressing the issue on the customers’ turf, yet so many companies are hesitant to leave home base.
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JNJ employees haven’t ventured into the blogosphere to tell their side of the story. Most of the posts on JNJ’s blog site are by two guys named Marc and Rob. Why didn’t they have their company’s back over the weekend? Or were they not allowed to post omn the topic?
It’s easy for us to watch from afar and criticize JNJ, but as John Taylor mentioned in his post last weekend we need to take a look at how the blogosphere has reacted to the Motrin ad and make sure we don’t get caught in a similar situation down the road.
If the same thing happened to us tomorrow, how would we react? Would we be able to set up a quick apology blog post? How long would it take you to get an apology video featuring one of your top execs posted on YouTube? Could you successfully mobilize your employees and ask them to help tell your side of the story? What does your company still have to learn?
November 18th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
Hi Justin,
Great post. The real question is whether, a day after the Motrin ad came down, J&J has done a postmortem to understand what went wrong.
This is a great case study of how a small number of dissenters can put a huge wrench into a corporate strategy. Had J&J been paying attention, who knows what the outcome might have been?
Best,
Daria
November 19th, 2008 at 8:47 pm
Good points, Daria. JNJ definitely needs to understand what went wrong and be proactive in letting the blogosphere and Twitter folks know they’ve made changes.
Best idea I heard so far was from @CamGross, who suggested JNJ should make another viral video about how much Motrin they’ve had to take because of the PR headache they caused themselves :).
Cheers,
Justin