MommyBloggers take on Motrin

If you’ve been paying any attention to the interwebs at all over the weekend, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about when I mention the Motrin debacle. Before I get into my own personal opinion about this whole mess, let’s quickly recap the situation to date.

First, Motrin put out the following ad:

And then, the world blew up. Seriously pissed off moms alllllll over Twitter and on blogs, everywhere, railed against the commercial, against the company and against the product. They all took offense at the idea that Motrin was trying to use something they all loved (baby wearing) to sell a pain reliever.

Ok. Wait. Stop. Everyone needs to calm the hell down first.

I’m not even going to get into the whole baby wearing thing, because I’m not a mom, have no intention of becoming a mom and therefore have no opinion. Do what you want, for whatever reason you want. As long as it works for you, great. Frankly, I don’t give a shit.

My problem is a more basic one that the one the moms got all up in arms about, and that is: People picked on the fact that Motrin talked about the practice of baby wearing, not about the fact that there was a misstep in their social media strategy (does Motrin even have a social media strategy?) and the fact that they didn’t pay attention to the conversation on the internet.

That’s the big problem. Who cares what they choose to be the kind of pain that people face? Maybe some people do experience discomfort in using a baby sling – we don’t know for sure, because we are not every person in the world.  No, Motrin’s big problem was that they came out of the gate with an ad, before listening to the chatter on the internet.

In Motrin’s defense, they did act fast when they saw the kerfuffle and put up the following message:

For a huge pharmaceutical giant, that kind of speed (this was up first thing Monday morning) is unprecedented. Seriously impressive Motrin.

This is just one example of the wildfire way that opinion and news can spread about your company without you even knowing it. If you don’t already have a social media strategy in place, you better get one, and quickly.

The truth of the matter is, even though moms on social networking sites are vocal, any community can be vocal online. One of the blogs I read about this said “this is one group you don’t want to piss off” but really, do you want to piss off any of your consumers online? Are you ok with not pissing off the moms, but maybe alienating all of the single women online? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

(image source: Motrin grabbed as a screen shot)