DAN NEELY - I am Networked Insights' founder and CEO. With over 10 years of management, operational and entrepreneurial experience with technology, manufacturing and services companies, I have expertise in customer intelligence and experience with the challenges companies face in gathering relevant, real-time insights about their customers.

How does a ripple become a wave?

December 5, 2008

We’ve all heard about a lot about Motrin lately and we all know there’s a brand team and an ad agency nursing some big time web 2.0-inflicted bruises. You know how much a slip like this hurts; it hurts morale, it hurts your PR and it hurts your bottom line. There are a bunch of potential customers who haven’t thought about Motrin lately who are hearing about it now for all the wrong reasons.The tough part is that it was entirely avoidable. We know Johnson and Johnson conducted focus groups with moms but we also know that traditional market research tools don’t keep pace with the speed of conversations on the web. Nor do they necessarily uncover the depth of engagement or sentiment felt about a topic by the target audience. The ad failed in several important ways:

its message about baby wearing came across as flippant
it reached an audience for whom the topic was deeply personal
it reached that audience in an environment (the web) where a vocal minority can dramatically influence a much larger group of media consumers

And that’s what happened. A small number of content creators created a ripple of negative sentiment towards the ad on the web. It quickly became a wave by virtue of a much larger group of media consumers linking to and interacting with the content. This in turn was picked up and distributed by major news media which prompted Johnson and Johnson to go into damage control mode and pull the campaign.

While the importance of content creators is obvious, the key to this social media story is the silent majority – those media consumers who speak through their actions on the web rather than by creating original content. They link, they read, they recommend, they share and by virtue of their actions they can act like a giant amplifier between a vocal minority and the wider distribution of ideas across the internet. And they strike fear in the hearts of lots of large companies.

Today, in order to build meaningful connections between your brand and consumers you have to know how your ad will be placed and who it will reach. You need to know how consumers are engaging around content and whether or not that engagement may indicate a potential groundswell (positive or negative) for your company or your brand. At Networked Insights we look at people creating content and we’ll show you how other media consumers are engaging with that content on the web so you can target your creative and your ad spend wisely.