“Companies that focus on earning love will thrive during hard times, and kick ass when good times return.” – Andy Sernovitz

Most people are still in the afterglow of the huge Obama campaign and election orgy. Everyone’s expectations of the new president-elect are higher than ever before. They don’t have a care in the world – Obama will take care of it. Obviously, there is no way he can live up to everyone’s expectations. He might be dead sexy tonight and can do know wrong but he isn’t going to look that good when we all wake up sober and realize he actually is a human.  Thats when his problems will start, this summer when the economy is still declining and oil prices start to go up.  When people realize we are still in Iraq and getting more involved in Afghanistan how is he going to keep Americans from treating him like George Bush? The twitterverse will slowly start talking about real things, as opposed to being his most loyal advocate. We’ll have to see how he deals with reality when it hits. We might be a little premature on this pradiction but we think sometime near the end of 09′ American’s will begin to take off their “Obama Beer Goggles”

I am sure everyone and their mother has heard about the Motrin drama. Motrin launched an online ad campaign targeting “babywearing” moms that was supposed to empathize with the pain associated with carrying your baby in a sling.

The reaction was less than positive. Moms were mad, real mad. Tweets, blogs, and youtube videos were popping up like crazy about the offense taken from the ad.

For those of you who thought that ad was pulled quickly enough that a spoof couldn’t be made, I am about to put your minds at ease. This is our favorite response video

Obviously, J&J should have tested the ad before the launch. That was their big mistake. Although they are still getting a ton of negative fallout from it they handled the reaction well. They immediately apologized and pulled the ad; it was launched on Friday and by Monday, the ad had been pulled. The buzz about the ad continued throughout the week and mostly fizzled by Friday.

The Motrin story is becoming an instant case study for how influential social media is on brands today. It also proves that there are huge opportunities to use social media to improve your brand image.

Even though there was negative buzz about Motrin, the good thing is that the fact that people were tweeting and blogging about it proves that there is some level of passion for the brand. Now Motrin’s challenge is to take that passion and make it positive.

So you might ask “what would buzz.io have done differently?” Well as you have heard us preach so many times from this pulpit it is about the conversations with your customers.  Don’t wait until a crisis to start talking.  Have you seen Motrin contact the offended mothers and apologize? they probably lost some moms forever because of this but by having a conversation they might have turned some anger into excitement because they are a brand that cares.

It isn’t too late for your brand – get out to the conversations and start talking!