MotrinMoms

If you have been paying attention to the Social Media buzz of the week, I'm sure you have all heard about the MotrinMoms controversy.

If not, here is a short recap:

Johnson & Johnson product, Motrin, offended mothers and fathers with an online and print ad which claimed that moms who carry their babies around with baby body carriers might possible suffer from back pain.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmykFKjNpdY&feature=related

Do see a problem with this ad? Well, mothers on Twitter went absolutely crazy over this. They claim the ad implied that moms carry their babies as fashion accessories.

Take a look at some of the ANGRY Tweets!

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

Two days after the this ad rocked the social media world, Motrin removed the ad from their website.

Here is the official statement from Kathy Widmer, McNeil's VP of Marketing. This email was sent to those who wrote a letter of complaint.

I am the Vice President of Marketing for McNeil Consumer Healthcare. I have responsibility for the Motrin Brand, and am responding to concerns about recent advertising on our website. I am, myself, a mom of 3 daughters.

We certainly did not mean to offend moms through our advertising. Instead, we had intended to demonstrate genuine sympathy and appreciation for all that parents do for their babies. We believe deeply that moms know best and we sincerely apologize for disappointing you.

Please know that we take your feedback seriously and will take swift action with regard to this ad. We are in process of removing it from our website. It will take longer, unfortunately, for it to be removed from magazine print as it is currently on newstands and in distribution.

So what is your take on all of this? Do you think a focus group could have prevented this whole mess? What do you think of the response?

Click on these links if you are interested in learning more about this Social Media disaster

Advertising Age

http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=132622

Mashable

http://mashable.com/2008/11/16/motrin-moms/

USA Today

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2008-11-18-motrin-ads-twitter_N.htm

How Will President Obama Use His Massive Social Media Influence?

This is a great follow-up article to my last post on Social Media and Politics. Thanks Mashable.


Hundreds if not thousands of observers have already noted the key role that the Internet and social media played in the successful campaign of Barack Obama. But when he’s President, how will he utilize the hundreds of thousands of MySpace friends, Facebook fans, Twitter followers, My.BarackObama.com members, and SMS opt-ins (just to name a few points of presence) to advance his policies and politics?

First off, Obama needs to decide that he wants to make social media tools a permanent part of his political strategy. This seems like a given – the tools he used (along with several new ones most likely) will certainly play a big part his 2012 re-election bid and that of whoever challenges him – but to-date, maintaining this massive social media program has been the role of volunteers and campaign staffers. MySpace and Facebook weren’t even a blip on the radar when Bush won re-election in 2004 – creating full-time positions within The White House to manage social media would be a first, but presumably, something we’ll soon see.

So far, Obama’s social media tools have been all about organizing campaigners and viral marketing. But now that he’s on his way to the presidency and no longer a campaigner, Tweets about upcoming rallies and embedding Obama speeches around the Web suddenly isn’t very useful. So how does he change the way he uses these tools once he’s in The White House? A few thoughts:

Calls to Service
Obama has often talked about a call to service during his campaign – things like expanding the Peace Corps and offering tax credits in exchange for public service. Why not allow users of MyBarackObama to utilize the platform to organize community service projects? Use Twitter and SMS to alert people to opportunities to give back in their own communities or when national tragedy strikes. Utilize Facebook to get the word out about charitable events. The tools and the users are already in place.

Rather than requiring people to be so proactive about doing good, Obama’s social media reach allows them to be reactive – staying informed of things going on in their communities, organizing people that can help, and then pitching in – all from the comfort of their personal computer.

Calls to Your Congressmen
With the shift of both The White House and Congress to a Democratic majority, you can expect to see lots of new legislation over the next four years. Obama’s social media platform offers an amazing opportunity to get people more involved in their government, by keeping them abreast of issues and urging them to contact their representatives to push policy forward.

After all – this is what representative government is supposed to be about – but, think about it, when was the last time you talked to your Congressman (or at least one of their handlers)? Obama can leverage social media to make people much more involved in the process of bills becoming laws, and encourage his supporters to pressure their representatives into supporting his policies.

Calls for Re-Election
Needless to say, Obama’s social media arsenal will soon need to be put to use for his 2012 re-election campaign. Campaigns for this past election started nearly two years ago, and that’s not likely to change in 2012 as Republicans look to gain back what they’ve lost. The key here is for Obama’s team to keep up with the new tools that will best drive enthusiasm and ultimately get people to the polls. Most of the tools that were so key in this year’s campaign didn’t even exist in 2004, and we’re likely to say the same in 2012 as we analyze the services the candidates are using to drive their online campaign efforts.

An Amazing Opportunity
In a quick poll of my Twitter followers, a few people immediately replied to my question of “how will Obama utilize Twitter?” with calls for more transparency in government. While I don’t expect to see tweets from @barackobama like “Reading the President’s daily briefing from CIA. Yikes!,” the opportunities outlined above would be game changing for America, and hopefully get us all – who are still clearly somewhat divided among party lines (53 to 46 percent is no endearing sign of unity in my opinion) – a bit more involved in our democracy.
http://mashable.com/2008/11/05/obama-social-media/

Social Media and Politics

Today my friend sent me an email containing a link to an online CNNBC video titled:

"Obama's Loss Traced To (Your Name)"

I clicked on the link and watched the short 2 min story. I could not stop laughing. My friend inserted my name to make it appear that I was the reason Obama lost the election. He lost by one vote, mine. So the story went on to interview angry voters who could not believe this one person ruined the election for Obama.

At the end of the message the screen says: (Your Name) this does not have to be the future. Get out and Vote.

HOW CLEVER!

So I started thinking about social media and the upcoming election and conducted some research.

Election 08 Social Media Showdown

Senator Barack Obama
Twitter http://twitter.com/barackobama 40,400 Followers
Facebook http://www.facebook.com/barackobama 1,019,657 Supporters
MySpace http://www.myspace.com/barackobama 401,807 Friends
YouTube http://www.youtube.com/barackobama Subscribers: 58,023 Channel Views: 14,495,498
LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/barackobama 500+ Connections

Senator John McCain
Twitter Unofficial Site http://twitter.com/JohnMcCain2008 1,166 Followers
Facebook http://www.facebook.com/johnmccain 149,505 Supporters
MySpace http://www.myspace.com/johnmccain 55,323 Friends
YouTube http://www.youtube.com/johnmccain Subscribers: 5,824 Channel Views: 739,510
LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnmccaindotcom 500+ Connections

Although one candidate may have more online followers and supporters than the other, it is interesting to see how social media has become so prominent in this years election.

Are you surprised by the candidates using social media to reach voters?

Social Media Glossary

Alright, so I know there are so many terms out there in reference to social media—and come to find out I’m not very well versed in the lingo just yet. To help myself (and others who may be struggling with the same problem) I’ve developed a glossary… feel free to add to my phase 1 attempt. I’m sure it’s incomplete!

Aggregation: The process of gathering and remixing content from blogs and other websites that provide RSS feeds.

Alerts: Search engines allow you to specify words, phrases or tags that you want checked periodically, with results of those searches returned to you by email. You may also be able to read the searches by RSS feed.

Authenticity: The sense that something or someone is “real”. Blogs enable people to publish content, and engage in conversations, that show their interests and values, and so help them develop an authentic voice online.

Avatars: Graphical images representing people. They are what you are in virtual worlds. You can build a visual character with the body, clothes, behaviors, gender and name of your choice. This may or may not be an authentic representation of yourself.

Back Channel Communications: Private emails or other messages sent by the facilitator or between individuals during public conferencing. They can have a significant effect on the way that public conversations go.Blogs are websites with dated items of content in reverse chronological order, self-published by bloggers. Items – sometimes called posts - may have keyword tags associated with them, are usually available as feeds, and often allow commenting.

Blogosphere: The term used to describe the totality of blogs on the Internet, and the conversations taking place within that sphere.

Blogroll: A list of sites displayed in the sidebar of blog, showing who the blogger reads regularly.

Bookmarking: Saving the address of a website or item of content, either in your broswer, or on a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us.

Browser: The tool used to view websites, and access all the content available there onscreen or by downloading. Browsers may also have features including the ability to read feeds, write blog items, view and upload photos to photosharing sites. Browsers have become the central tool for using social media as more and more tools previously used on our desktops are becoming free online.

Chat: Interaction on a web site, with a number of people adding text items one after the other into the same space at (almost) the same time. A place for chat – chat room – differs from a forum because conversations happen in “real time”, rather as they do face to face.

Collaboration: social media tools from email lists to virtual worlds offer enormous scope for collaboration. Low-risk activities like commenting, social bookmarking, chatting and blogging help develop the trust necessary for collaboration.

Collective Intelligence: The capacity of a human community to evolve toward higher order complexity thought, problem-solving and integration through collaboration and innovation. For a network to develop this “mind of its own” there needs to be willingness among members to share and collaborate.

Comments: Blogs may allow readers to add comments under items, and may also provide a feed for comments as well as for main items. That means you can keep up with conversations without having to revisit the site to check whether anything has been added.

Commitment: The “social” aspect of social media means that tools are most useful when other people commit to using them too. Commitment will depend on people’s degree of interest in a subject, capability online, preparedness to share with others, degree of comfort in a new place, as well as the usability of the site or tool.
Connections: as high-speed, always-on, broadband connections becomes more widely available, it is easy to forget that the speed and nature of Internet connection available to people on a network will determine what tools they can use. If people are still using slow telephone dial up they may have problems with video and voice over IP. Content used here to describe text, pictures, video and any other meaningful material that is on the Internet.

Content management systems: Sometime described as the Swiss Army knives of social media. They are software suites offering the ability to create static web pages, document stores, blog, wikis, and other tools. CMSs have the advantage of offering comprehensive solutions - but can be challenging to configure, and each of the different tools may not be quite as good as a stand-along version.

Crowd sourcing: Refers to harnessing the skills and enthusiasm of those outside an organization who are prepared to volunteer their time contributing content and solving problems.

Email lists: Important networking tools offering the facility to “starburst” a message from a central postbox to any number of subscribers, and for them to respond. Lists usually offer a facility for reading and replying through a web page - so they can also operate like forums.
Face-to-face: Used to describe people meeting offline. While social media may reduce the need to meet, direct contact gives far more clues, quickly, about a person than you can get online. Online interaction is likely to be richer after f2f meetings.

Facilitator: Someone who helps people in an online group or forum manage their conversations. They may help agree a set of rules, draw out topics for discussion, gently keep people on topic, and summarize. See also roles.

Feeds: The means by which you can read, view or listen to items from blogs and other RSS-enabled sites without visiting the site, by subscribing and using an aggregator or newsreader. Feeds contain the content of an item and any associated tags without the design or structure of a web page.

Folksonomy: Taxonomies are centralized ways of classifying information - as in libraries. Folksonomies are the way folk create less structured ways of classifying by adding tags.

Forums: are discussion areas on websites, where people can post messages or comment on existing messages asynchronously – that is, independently of time or place. Chat is the synchronous equivalent. Friends: on social networking sites, are contacts whose profile you link to in your profile. On some sites people have to accept the link, in others, not.

Groups: are collections of individuals with some sense of unity through their activities, interests or values. They are bounded: you are in a group, or not. They differ in this from networks, which are dispersed, and defined by nodes and connections.

Instant messaging: (IM) is chat with one other person. Using an IM tool like AOL Instant Messenger, Microsoft Live Messenger or Yahoo Messenger. The tools allow you to indicate whether or not you are available for a chat, and if so can be a good alternative to emails for a rapid exchange. Joining up: A big opportunity - and challenge - in the world of social media and networking. On the one hand links, tags and feeds - together with the spirit of openness - means content in different places can be brought together (aggregated). On the other hand, the move from groups to networks, and forums to blogs, means that content is spread around and there is seldom a one-stop-shop.

Links: The highlighted text or images that, when clicked, jump you from one web page or item of content to another. Bloggers use links a lot when writing, to reference their own or other content. Linking is another aspect of sharing, by which you offer content that may be linked, and acknowledge the value of other's people's contributions by linking to them. It is part of being open and generous.

Lurkers: People who read but don't contribute or add comments to forums. The one per cent rule-of-thumb suggests about one per cent of people contribute new content to an online community, another nine percent comment, and the rest lurk. However, this may not be a passive role because content read on forums may spark interaction elsewhere.

Mapping: networks enables you see who are the main connecting people. To do that you may need to ask people who they communicate with most frequently. If you want to grow an online community or network from an existing "real world" network, it will be important that the key people in the network overlap with the champions for online networking.

Mashups: The smart mixes that techies do to combine several tools to create a new web services.

Meetings: are important in social networking in at least two ways. First, they accelerate the process of people getting to know each other. See Face-to-face. Second, the open and fluid style of social media is making those using it impatient with committee-style meetings and conferences dominated by platform speakers.

Membership: involves belonging to a group. Networking can offer some of the benefits of group membership, without the need for as much central co-ordination. A rise in networking may present challenges for organizations who depend on membership for funds or to demonstrate their credibility.

Networks: Structures defined by nodes and the connections between them. In social networks the nodes are people, and the connections are the relationships that they have. Networking is the process by which you develop and strengthen those relationships.

Newsreader: A website or desktop tool that act as an aggregator, gathering content from blogs and similar sites using RSS feeds so you can read the content in one place, instead of having to visit different sites.

Openness: Being prepared to share and collaborate – something aided by social media.

Open source software: developed collaboratively with few constraints on its use - is a technical example. In order to be open online you may offer share-alike copyright licenses, and you may tag content and link generously to other people's content. This demonstrates open source thinking.

Open-source software: Refers to any computer software whose source code is available under a license that permits users to study, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified form.

Permalink: The address (URL) of an item of content, for example a blog post, rather than the address of a web page with lots of different items. You will often find it at the end of a blog post.

Photosharing: Uploading your images to a website like Flickr. You can add tags and offer people the opportunity to comment or even re-use your photos if you add an appropriate copyright license.

Platform: The framework or system within which tools work. That platform may be as broad as mobile telephony, or as narrow as a piece of software that has different modules like blogs, forums, and wikis in a suite of tools. As more and more tools operate "out there" on the web, rather than on your desktop, people refer to "the Internet as the platform". That has advantages, but presents challenges in learning lots of different tools, and getting them to join up.

Podcast: Audio or video content that can be downloaded automatically through a subscription to a website so you can view or listen offline.

Post: An item on a blog or forum.Presence online has (at least) two aspects. One is whether you show up when someone does a search on your name. If not, no good pretending to be an online guru. The second is whether you use tools that show you are available for contact by instant messaging, voice over IP, or other synchronous methods of communication.

Profiles: The information that you provide about yourself when signing up for a social networking site. As well as a picture and basic information, this may include your personal and business interests, a "blurb" about yourself, and tags to help people search for like-minded people.

Proprietary: software, unlike Open-source software, is owned by someone - whether Microsoft or an individual developer. Some proprietary software may be free, and some open-source software may be sold. The issue is the terms under which the underlying code is available.

Readiness: a check on whether you - or your organization - are prepared to engage with social media.

Remixing: Social media offers the possibility of taking different items of content, identified by tags and published through feeds, and combining them in different ways. You can do this with other people's content if they add an appropriate copyright license.

Roles: Parties need hosting, committees need chairing, and working groups may need facilitation. Online networks and communities need support from people who may be called, for example, technology stewards or network weavers. Champions are the core group of enthusiasts you need to start a community.

RSS: Short for Really Simple Syndication. This allows you to subscribe to content on blogs and other social media and have it delivered to you through a feed.

Sharing: offering other people the use of your text, images, video, bookmarks or other content by adding tags, and applying copyright licenses that encourage use of content.

Social media: A term for the tools and platforms people use to publish, converse and share content online. The tools include blogs, wikis, podcasts, and sites to share photos and bookmarks.

Social networking: Sites are online places where users can create a profile for themselves, and then socialize with others using a range of social media tools including blogs, video, images, tagging, lists of friends, forums and messaging.

Startpage: like Pageflakes, Netvibes or Google Personalised Home page - is web page that you can configure to pull in content from a range of web-based services including email, feeds from blogs and news services. It is a multi-purpose aggregator.

Subscribing: The process of adding an RSS feed to your aggregator or newsreader. It's the online equivalent of signing up for a magazine, but usually free.

Synchronous communications: Those occurring in real time, like chat, audio or video. Face-to-face communication is synchronous in the same place. Telephony is synchronous, in different places; The Internet extends the scope for both types of communication.

Tags: Keywords attached to a blog post, bookmark, photo or other item of content so you and others can find them easily through searches and aggregation. Tags can usually be freely chosen - and so form part of a folksonomy - while categories are predetermined and are part of a taxonomy.

Taxonomy: An organized way of classifying content, as in a library. Providing contributors to a site with a set of categories under which they can add content is offering a taxonomy. Allowing people to add their own keywords is to endorse folksonomy.

Technology Steward: Someone who can facilitate community and network development. Nancy White offers the definition: “Technology stewards are people with enough experience of the workings of a community to understand its technology needs, and enough experience with technology to take leadership in addressing those needs. Stewardship typically includes selecting and configuring technology, as well as supporting its use in the practice of the community".

Teleconferencing: Holding a meeting without being in the same place, using a network connection and tools like Voice over IP, Instant Messaging, Video, and Whiteboards.

Term of Services: The basis on which you agree to use a forum or other web-based place for creating or sharing content. Check before agreeing what rights the site owners may claim over your content.

Threads: Strands of conversation. On an email list or web forum they will be defined by messages that use the use the same subject. On blogs they are less clearly defined, but emerge through comments and trackbacks.

Trackback: some blogs provide a facility for other bloggers to leave a calling card automatically, instead of commenting. A blogger may write on blog A about an item on blogger B's site, and through the trackback facility leave a link on B's site back to A. The collection of comments and trackbacks on a site facilitates conversations.

Transparency: Enhancing searching, sharing, self-publish and commenting across networks makes it easier to find out what's going on in any situation where there is online activity.

Troll: A hurtful but possibly valuable loser who, for whatever reason, is both obsessed by and constantly annoyed with, and deeply offended by everything you write on your blog. You may be able to stop them commenting on your blog, but you can’t ban them from commenting on other sites and pointing back to your blog, and you can’t ban them from posting things on their own blog that point back to your site.

User Generated Content: Text, photos and other material produced by people who previously just consumed. See content.

Video: Many digital cameras and mobile phones take videos good enough to view on the Net. Sites like YouTube and blip.tv now make it easy to open an account, upload and share your videos. These sites will also provide some unique code for each video so you can, if you wish, embed the video in a blog post.
Virtual worlds: are online places like Second Life, where you can create a representation of yourself and socialize with other residents. Basic activity is free, but you can buy currency (using real money) in order to purchase land and trade with other residents.

Voice over Internet Protocol: (VOIP) enables you to use a computer or other Internet device for phone calls without additional charge, including conference calls.

Web 2.0: A term to describe blogs, wikis, social networking sites and other Internet-based services that emphasize collaboration and sharing, rather than less interactive publishing (Web 1.0). It is associated with the idea of the Internet as platform.

Web-based tools: Google, Yahoo and a host of other commercial organizations provide an increasing range of free or low-cost tools including email, calendars, word processing, and spreadsheets that can be used on the web rather than your desktop.

Widgets: Stand-alone applications you can embed in other applications, like a website or a desktop, or view on its own on a PDA. These may help you to do things like subscribe to a feed, do a specialist search, or even make a donation.

Whiteboards: The equivalent of glossy surfaces where you can write with an appropriate marker pen and wipe off later. They are tools that enable you to write or sketch on a web page, and as such are useful in collaboration online.

Wiki: A web page - or set of pages - that can be edited collaboratively. The best known example is Wikipedia, an encyclopedia created by thousands of contributors across the world. Once people have appropriate permissions - set by the wiki owner - they can create pages and/or add to and alter existing pages. Wikis are a good way for people to write a document together, instead of emailing files to and fro. You don't have to use wikis for collaborative working - they can just be a quick and easy way of creating a web site. Although wikis are easy to use, that doesn't mean everyone in a group will commit to their use with similar enthusiasm. See commitment, readiness.

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Twitter: UPDATE

A few weeks ago I posted about Twitter. I admitted that I was clueless and really didn't think that I would learn very much from using it. However, I did.

Not only have I learned something, I'm really enjoying my Twitter experience. The first thing I did was search the key word, public relations to see who would come up. I read bios and those who I found interesting I followed. My next step was to tweet using the word social media. About an hour or so after my tweet, I was being followed! It has been a few weeks later and I have around 47 followers and am following 46 others. Everyday I receive updates on social media, conferences, marketing trends, news briefs and other information that I find useful as a public relations professional learning about social media. So, everyday I try to post something useful to others and in turn gain followers who I am interested in following myself.

For all of you non-Twitter users, does this make sense? What complications do you run into when using or trying to understand Twitter? Let me know and I will try to help!

Google Reader

Have you ever heard of Google Reader? It's awesome. If you like to visit a ton of blogs whether they are family/friend or news related, the best place to keep track of all the updates is in Google Reader.

For example, I subscribe to a variety of social media blogs. Before I knew about google reader I would save them in my favorites folder and when I would remember I would check them to see if they had any updates. Not only would Iforget to check them daily, it was becoming a pain to go through the process especially when I would find out the blogs were not even updated. So, my kind and friendly co-worker pointed me to google reader where I signed in with my regular gmail account information. This application allows me to keep all of my blogs in one place and alerts me whenever they are updated. I don't even have to leave the page to read them. IT IS GREAT and a big time saver! Check out this article for more in-depth information!

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-9745368-2.html