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!

Here is our logo – we like it a lot.

This is how buzz.io helps you build inbound links to your website:

1. We monitor the conversations that are happening all over the web. Whenever somebody talks about your brand or your category we will instantly alert you to the situation. We let you know what people are talking about and what consumers want. Few things are more valuable to a company that quality consumer feedback.
2. Discover your web ecosystem – what sites do you need a link from? How can you get it? We automatically identify the sites that are ranking high for your keywords, allow links to be followed by search engines, allow commenting and are indexed frequently. Then our software will serve up those pages on a silver platter. You get involved in the conversation on that page. Make a contribution and drop in a link that is related to that same content on your website. Buzz.io also contributes to conversation and helps get positive chatter started.

Other services exist to facilitate link building

Check out lavalinx.com they are creating a link exchange marketplace that easily facilitates complex link trades like triangle trading.

Social Media sites

Stumble upon

Friend Feed

Twitter

Jaiku

Pownce

Del.icio.us

Using these services our clients add hundreds of extremely high quality back links every month. Doing that will rocket you to the top of the SERP (search engine results page)

And if you thought I was done referencing high school, you were dead wrong. If you want to be popular, you have to make friends with the “cool” kids. But not just any old cool kids, the kids that are popular among the group you want to be friends with. I hope we’ve all learned our lesson about this from countless teen movies.