Jason
Alcorn and I took some time and examined the data around the Motrin Mom
outbreak last week. In case you missed it, Motrin put a video ad
up on their website that managed to offend some mothers because they
claimed it insulted them for wearing their infants. As a babywearer
myself, (and my wife as well), neither of us were offended, but that's
neither here nor there.
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.
Motrin's brand handled this well. The quick
apology made a story that shouldn't have created lots of coverage
evaporate quickly. There are some lessons, big and small, that you can
learn.
Apologies are cheap and worth their value
Motrin
apologized and the story, which probably shouldn't have had legs in the
first place, evaporated. You barely heard anything in the news 3 days
later, except from web pundits like me. Take a look at this graph of
digg.com traffic voting up one of the original Motrin Mom articles. It
rises and falls with the Eastern to Pacific business hours, and then
expires.
People go to search when an issue breaks out
If
you had any doubt that you need to pay attention to your search engine
profile, data like this graph should put that to rest. 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 push 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.
Disclosure: Neither Jason nor I work for Motrin or any other J&J health brands.

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