Are you still trying to convince your management why your brand should be monitoring Social Media?  Well if you are a Consumer Packaged Good brand (or any brand really), just look at what happened to Motrin over the past couple of days and the reaction of Motrin Moms.

A simple search on Twitter of #motrinmoms will show you that they pissed off a lot of people with their latest ad around “babywearing.”  Mommy Bloggers are not people you want to mess with and you sure better understand the sandbox you are playing in if you do them wrong.  For instance, just look at this Consumer Generated Media that has already popped up in response.  Not exactly brand content you want at the top of search results.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhR-y1N6R8Q]

The Lesson for Brand Managers:

Motrin screwed up.  It happens.  But in today’s world of Social Media, the place they really screwed up was in not monitoring what people were saying about the brand.  This PR disaster is happening underneath their nose and no one on the brand is responding.  Not their advertising agency, not their Public Relations group and not the brand itself.   The unfortunate fact is that company’s haven’t trained Brand Managers to respond quickly to situations like this.  That needs to change….and it needs to change fast.

People are going to be talking about your brand, with or without the Brand Manager’s permission.  This simple fact is reason enough that you should be monitoring the conversations around your brand.  Motrin is just the latest brand to learn this lesson the hard way.

UPDATE – Well it looks like Motrin is trying to respond.  If you commented on their website, it looks like their VP of Marketing has a response that is being sent out (Thanks to Amy Gates for the lead).  And the Motrin.com site has been taken down for now, but thanks to the power of YouTube, you can still see the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmykFKjNpdY (Thanks Bill Seaver)

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Catching up on the DVR this weekend, I was watching the season finale of “My Name is Earl” when a great brand integration caught my attention. It turns out that Klondike Bar is bringing back their great jingle of “What would you do for a Klondike Bar” and blasting the message across multiple new media channels.

Nostalgia is a powerful marketing tool

Many brand managers/agencies suffer from NCH (Not Created Here), causing them to turn their back on great campaigns/jingles of old. But the smart folks at Klondike are embracing nostalgia in their campaign, but doing it through new tools with Consumer Generated Media, Branded Entertainment and Public Relations.

First, the whole campaign revolves around the “What would you do” contest where you can submit a video showing just what you would do for that Klondike. The top video will be $100K and the chance to meet “The Lonely Island “ team (which in itself is a huge prize for aspiring comedians/writers). Second, they created what I thought was a pretty natural integration with “My Name is Earl” where Randy proceeds to do several “wacky” things to get a Klondike Bar. Third they tied this integration and contest together with spots throughout the show promoting the contest (the spots alone made me laugh out loud…much to the annoyance of my girlfriend). Finally, they added a dose of PR with an appearance on Jay Leno to promote the contest as well. Interestingly, both Earl and Leno are on NBC so this seems to be a top-to-top integration.

All in all, I have to say this is a great way to do Consumer/User Generated Media and New Media thanks to the following:

1. Klondike didn’t just rely on traditional media & :30 second spots to promote the contest.
2. They gave consumers a “Creative Brief” to follow with a specific framework “What Would Do” and specific categories: Laughs, Did You See that?, and Flaunt It.
3. They gave incentives for submitting videos ($$$ and trip) AND for watching/engaging with the videos ($25K for watching/rating videos)
4. They didnt walk away from nostalgia and try to create a new tagline. More marketers need to stop spending millions to generate awareness of a new tagline that no consumer really cares about anyways.

What do you think? Did Klondike do it right? What elements would you have added or gotten rid of?

I am heading off to Las Vegas for a couple of business meetings.  Since I am not sure how much access I will have when it comes to blogging, I wanted to send out my weekly round-up a bit early.  Here’s what caught my eye this:

• Interactive Marketing in Politics – 10 Takeaways: My friend (and former Mt Adams neighbor) Pete Blackshaw had a great summary of his takeaways from how politicians are using the Net in the Primaries.   Of the 10 he listed, I most connected with the idea of “engage, enroll, and participate”.   Consumers today are action oriented (and politics are so by their very nature) so it is key to actively engage consumers.  All the candidates this year have done an amazing job of giving consumers the tools to engage….brands could learn something from this.
• Netflix Prize – Getting close to a winner:  The Challenge Dividend gives an update on the Netflix Prize, where the company is offering a prize of $1 million dollars to anyone that can improve their member movie recommendations by 10%.   So far the closest someone has gotten is 8.82%.  Think you can do better?  Well then try your hand at Crowdsourcing and see what happens.
• In-game ad spending will hit $650 million by 2012 - eMarketer :  Ads in videogames will increase from $295 million in 2007 to $650 million in 2012.  With predictions like that, it sounds like Microsoft made the right move buying Massive to enter that market.