Pity the marketing execs at Motrin whose attempt to be cool and funny is turning into this week’s object lesson in how quickly a misjudged engagement with a key audience demographic can snowball into a very painful and damaging experience for the brand in question. The backlash seen on Twitter and Facebook is a response to this video:

Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim posts a TwitScoop graph showing just how fast this online reputation crisis came to a boil, saying: “Taking a look at the negative Twitter conversations surrounding #motrinmom demonstrates that Motrin is, in just a few short hours, facing a huge reputation disaster–initiated by the very audience Motrin hoped to target, ‘Mama Bloggers’.”

Mathew Ingram is spot on when he says: “If you’re one of those who believes that ‘any publicity is good publicity’, or that getting potential customers ‘engaged’ with your product includes pissing them off, then the Motrin campaign probably seems like a great success. And I’m sure there are those who will argue that the critical Motrin moms are a vocal minority, that they are too easily offended by something that was meant to be humorous, etc. That may even be true. But it’s still a problem for the company — a very modern problem. For better or worse, this kind of social-media ‘flash flood’ of negative PR involving Twitter, blogs and Facebook is becoming more and more commonplace. It will be interesting to see how Motrin responds.”

Just days before this storm hit, Seamus McAuley at Virtual Economics summed up his contrasting experiences of being approached by companies with very different ideas of how to talk to bloggers, adding: “It’s an odd state of affairs when sending an email begins to look like rocket science.”

Blogging for change
From one type of lesson to another, Dave Winer highlights three examples of great blogging about TechMeme’s openness or lack thereof, Barack Obama’s YouTube bias, and criticism of the people selected for the President-elect’s transition team on tech policy, saying: “There’s not enough great blogging, so when it happens, it’s worth pointing out. [...] what do I mean by great blogging?
1. People talking about things they know about, not just expressing opinions about things they are not experts in (nothing wrong with that, of course).
2. Asking hard questions that powerful people might not want to be asked.
3. Saying things that few people have the courage to say.”

Obama facing Crackberry rehab?
Staying with Obama and hard things to say, the New York Times reports on the very real issue facing the President-elect – he will probably have to surrender his Blackberry when he takes up the mantle of POTUS.

Rob Cottingham at ReadWriteWeb recognises the irony of the first politician to truly grok social media suddenly being disconnected from the hive mind, saying: “Too bad. I’d dreamed he’d be using Twitterberry to share tidbits from NSA briefings (“OMFG @Biden – can you believe Libya is at it AGAIN?!”). At the very least, I was hoping he could liveblog his own inauguration: ’12:03 pm – Putting my left hand on the Bible, raising my right. Then bringing both hands over to the keyboard to type this. Roberts is starting to look impatient.’”

The Latest Death-of-Journalism Spat, Condensed for Easy Reading
Finally, in a masterful demonstration of analysis in the Twitter age of brevity, Craig Stoltz at Web2.0h…Really? presents the digested Jarvis v. Rosenbaum, saying: “Many pixels were spilt in last week’s sh*tspatter feud between digital news evangelist Jeff Jarvis and veteran print author Ron Rosenbaum. I read the whole damn thing and, as a public service, present this tidy downboil. Links provided for future-of-news geeks and shut-ins.”