Four years ago, an online storm erupted over the best-selling bicycle lock brand in the USA and how anyone could open the lock with a simple ball-point pen.
During a 10-day period, a groundswell of commentary and opinion about CNN Money has a good summary and created the graph that shows what happened in such a short time (click to see larger size).What’s not factored into that dollar figure is the cost to reputation.
Wind forward four years to this past weekend and an online storm that has erupted over McNeil that very quickly offended some mothers.
The storm of protest that has embraced so many different online communication channels – from blogs to video and especially to social networking micro-channels like
And all this has happened in less than 48 hours.
So what’s this all about? Well, take a look for yourself – the pulled video is on YouTube and plenty of other places (including links from blog posts like this one).
What’s most compelling to me isn’t the video that McNeil produced. It’s not especially remarkable: it’s a good example of a marketing message in audio-visual form, nicely produced and quite watchable.
What’s really compelling is the content angry mothers have created themselves, using tools and channels that largely weren’t around four years ago – YouTube, for instance, and definitely Twitter – but today are accessible and easy to use by anyone with an internet connection.
It’s what we tend to label today with the impersonal phrase “user-generated content.”
For instance, check this video out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhR-y1N6R8QI don’t know about you but I can’t help but feel almost overwhelmed by the emotion expressed in these images and the words shown in the various Twitter messages.
And look at what you get if you do a The first result is a link to a Clay Shirky would be proud
It’s the scale and speed that still takes many people in the PR business by surprise, used as we still generally are to things developing at a more leisurely pace (let’s call it “analogue speed”) attuned to the traditional news-gathering and reporting cycles of traditional print and broadcast media. Those days are gone. We no longer have that luxury. As communicators, we must enable our attention all day every single day. And that includes the weekends, something it seems the Motrin communicators weren’t doing. Of the many blog posts published by communicators and pundits with opinions, one of the best I’ve seen comes from Forrester analyst MotrinMoms – is an enormous self-organized focus group, providing the brand owner with amazing feedback on their product. My podcasting partner yesterday’s FIR #398 podcast. We’d love to know your opinion about this kerfuffle so do Comments
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