Exploring Social Media: The Motrin Moment Impact of Social Media

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Exploring Social Media article series badgeHave you heard of Motrin? The pain reliever? If you hadn’t before this weekend, you probably have heard plenty about it now, especially on Twitter this weekend.

The debacle is described best in the article Advertising Age, “How Twittering Critics Brought Down Motrin Mom Campaign,” which explains how the Johnson & Johnson product offended mothers and fathers with an online and print ad for Motrin which claimed that some moms carry their babies around with baby body carriers as a “fashion statement” and summed it up with “Supposedly it’s a real bonding experience, but what about me?”

The outrage rocked the social media world. tweets on Motrin went berserk as people were outraged at this slam against parenthood and parent/child bonding. Within two days of mass online social outrage, the ad campaign was pulled and the Motrin’s website featured an apology saying: [Read more…]

Exploring Social Media: It Starts With One

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social media - one to one relationship is better than one to manyA lot of early web adopters understood community right away. It’s the chance to reach hundreds, thousands, no – millions.

Unfortunately, most got it wrong. A web page isn’t like a television ad, reaching out to million of viewers at one time. A web page speaks to the one, a single representative of a community.

A community doesn’t start with millions. It starts with one. If you serve the one, the one will tell one, who will tell two, who will tell six, and so on and so on. If you don’t serve the one… and each one after… bye bye, community.

Social media is about the social as well as the community. This means that you have to service the individual’s needs for them to come together as a whole.

Today’s businesses have to do a total rethink. It no longer is about serving their market, it’s about serving the like-minded individuals as a collective. [Read more…]

Learning Blogging and Social Media in Hawaii

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Hawaii Geek Week continues in Honolulu, Hawaii. Yesterday’s Web Weavers Workshop with Lorelle in Hawaii was a tremendous success. A couple dozen people learned how to blog beginning with what a blog is and ending with how blogging is already changing their lives by giving people a platform upon which to speak and share and learn.

Web Weavers Workshop for bloggers by Lorelle VanFossen

Web Weavers Workshop for bloggers by Lorelle VanFossen

The participants ranged from total newbies trying to understand what this “blogging thing” is all about, to business owners and professionals familiar with website technology and development and eager to take it a few steps further into blogging and social media.

Each participant made a plan for their blog, signed up for a free blog, and started filling in the blanks and choosing a WordPress Theme.

Many arrived with the preconceived notion that blogging is hard and complicated, and left realizing that blogging is easy. It’s finding your passion to share with the world that is really the hardest part of the puzzle. A few had set ideas on what they wanted to blog about when they arrived, but through the step-by-step process of drilling down their idea into an actionable plan for their blogs, they realized that they didn’t have the content, nor the commitment, to blog their idea over the long term. A few changed paths midstream and left the day-long workshop inspired and ready to embrace their blog in a new direction.

The next in the natural evolution of a blog came today at the Social Media Club Workshop. [Read more…]