Congratulations (sort of) Motrin:

You are trending on Twitter!

Congratulations Motrin…

I’m going to take a wild guess that McNeil Consumer Healthcare, a Division of McNEIL-PPC, and their agency of record (Taxi NYC, from what we can tell at the moment) are not carefully monitoring Twitter right now. I’m also going to guess that you’re going to hear a thing or two more about this in the business press (WSJ, Forbes, AP, NYT) before it subsides.

The Fuss.

Many moms (and dads) who blog and tweet and are fans of “babywearing” are finding this Motrin ad (currently it’s right on Sunday afternoon it was pulled from the Motrin.com home page, which was more or less down for the next 16 hours and now displays their apologia) patronizing and disrespectful of the practice of babywearing. It’s kicked up some relatively strong feelings among the community, and a resulting loud racket on Twitter and blogs. (I’ll disclose: 1) I agree the ad is a bit dumb, 2) that I was a babywearer, and 3) that frankly, carrying those g-dmn “bucket style” infant carseats wrecked my back way more than any of my slings and backpacks ever did. But that’s not the point.) UPDATE: Follow the Twittering here. Skimbaco (Katja Presnal) compiled the Twitter screenshots and babywearing photos video below, and collected a long list of blog responses, including her original post. (Found via Jet With Kids)

The Reponse.

On Twitter right now, nothing has appeared from Johnson & Johnson, McNeil Consumer Healthcare, Motrin or Taxi.

Huh.

The Lesson.

Even if your brand or agency isn’t ready to engage formally and integrate the business applications of Twitter throughout your campaigns, community building and other market engagement efforts, you need to get clued in — fast — to the reasons, times and ways that you can listen. Maybe you’re not even ready for full-time social media monitoring. That’s your call. But not tuning in while you launch a new tactic borders on gross negligence, in this day and age.

Rolling out a new tactic is THE most important time to lend an ear. Smart SuperBowl advertisers could have gained instant consumer feedback on their efforts during the game last year. After every ad Twitter lit up with opinions. Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang prepared this formal analysis based on responses sent to his experimental account @superbowlads. His colleague (who co-authored Groundswell) Josh Bernoff shared his assessment here. Searching or watching Twitter’s search tools for your brand at the moment your ad aired would have yielded even more results.

I’ll update this post as I hear more, and when the companies involved begin to respond. Meanwhile, if your company doesn’t have a good understanding of how your full range of market engagement needs to be informed by sensitive consumer sentiment engines like Twitter, you might want to give your agency a call.

Coda

(Evolving: I’ll spare you all the “UPDATE” notations)

• Lesson #2: the Twitter chatter is not to be dismissed as an angry mob. There are TONS of productive ideas being shared. The company that listens, learns. (and, earns!)
• AdeleMcAlear Searched YouTube for “Motrin baby ad” and noticed the protest videos have already been up for 12 hours (at 3:30 EST Sunday), including Twitter screen shots. She also uncovered this blogger’s (awkwardly self-promotional) report that she called Taxi’s Director of Corporate Communications at home who had not, then, heard of the fuss.
• McNeil marketing VP responds. In an email to Katja Presnal:
  

We believe deeply that moms know best and we sincerely apologize for disappointing you. Please know that we take your feedback seriously and will take swift action with regard to this ad.

• Later, McNeil posted that apology on Motrin.com
• Seth Godin weighs in: not a very useful apology.
• Josh Bernoff breaks down the events, and agrees with Godin.
• Jeremiah Owyang’s analysis with screenshots and brand impact context

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Either directly or indirectly, Twitter is loaded with market intelligence for your business. With an estimated 3 million current users who are voraciously talking about what makes them happy and what makes them angry - your products and your market segment are likely being discussed. Let’s take a walk through how this works.

Using Twitter search, we can quickly find mentions of our products or company in specific context.

Here we see an easy one (unfortunate for Qwest), but as Qwest we’d like to see who is talking about us. A quick check for “Qwest Sucks” brings up a litany of complaints about Qwest and its service. Many of these are very specific complaints that can be cross-checked, verified and used to improve service. It’s also an excellent measure of popular opinion about our company.

Mind you, opinion’s not always negative. Another search for “Qwest Rocks,” shows that sentiment about Qwest isn’t all negative.

Qwest customer services has indeed made some users happy. Qwest should be directly thanking these users for their patronage and letting them know they enjoy working with them.

For the less positive ones, Qwest should also respond and let them know they have been heard.
But we don’t need to be so specific. Suppose we are opening an Italian restaurant in Portland’s Pearl District. Maybe we want to know the buzz on other Italian restaurants in Portland and the Pearl District in general.

Here we see that there are a few tweets talking about Italian food in Portland and at least one pointing us to more detailed information in specific blog posts.

We can also look at the frequency of posts to tell us how hot Italian food might actually be in Portland and compare that to some other types of food.

We can also check on the Pearl District itself. Are people going to the Pearl District? Why are they going there? Is an Italian restaurant going to fit there?

We can see by the age and frequency of tweets that the Pearl District in general is more popular in Portland than Italian Restaurants.

Is Twitter going to be your only source of Market Data? Certainly not.

But Twitter is a great, free repository of general and honest conversation from which we can gather a wide range of information.

Jim Benson is a partner at Modus Cooperandi and blogs at Evolving Web. Jim is a management consultant who uses social media tools and principles to help his clients communicate.  Follow him on Twitter.

Hubspot, after calmly rolling with extensive audio troubles, delivered a very nice “Twitter for Business 101″ webinar this afternoon. How to Use Twitter for Marketing and PR was hosted by Rick Burnes, Mike Volpe and Ellie Mirman. You can watch it full-length below or skip ahead for some highlights.

How to succeed on twitter:

1. build your network
2. engage with community
3. track & analyze your results

Decide how to manage business vs. personal accounts. They choose to keep them pretty separate, others choose a different mix. I’d add: that may evolve for you, over time.

Businesses on Twitter should:

• follow everyone back, so folks feel listened to. They gave the example of @barackobama vs @hillaryclinton. I’d add: this also lets your Twitter community contact you privately, which I think is a good idea for business.
• show off your employee Twitterers, like HubSpot and Zappos do
• follow Comcast’s example of how to respond to customers via Twitter. (Ed.: Little-known fact, Comcast listened to Twitter for about 2 months before they famously responded to blogger Michael Arrington’s woes. Good practice to imitate.)

Twitter is so important to Hubspot that when hiring, they look at whether the potential employee is engaged on Twitter, and even what their follower count is.

Measurement: Four ways to measure and track your Twitter activity:

1. Follower count (but they acknowledge that measure is of limited value)
2. Their tool Twitter Grader
3. Look at @replies - is your audience engaging with you?
4. Visitors to site and leads

Tools and resources:

• Listening - they use their own proprietary software and keyword searches to listen to conversations that are relevant to them
• URL shorteners - like tinyurl.com, bit.ly, others
• Desktop clients - Twitterific, Tweetdeck,
• Mobile access - applications and SMS
• Publishing - Twitterfeed can automatically share RSS
• Tagging - #hashtags and other agreed-upon keywords

Unfortunately these notes are from “attending” via audio only, as Citrix‘ GoToWebinar crunched under the load of 3700+ registered attendees. A fast-thinking attendee caught this neat screenshot explaining what Twitter is. The full slide deck is now on Slideshare:

Chris Lynch was kind enough to interview me for this CIO Magazine article yesterday. I like the framework and examples he put together:

1. (Careful) Product Pushing. Examples: @JetBlue announcing their eBay auctions; @KodakCB tweeting about their product in action.
2. Community Outreach. He nods to @WholeFoods and @PopeyesChicken and urges “think about the communities you serve, online and offline”
Image via Wikipedia
3. How-to and Service Questions. No surprise to see @Comcastcares, but cool example from @Pandora_Radio too. (An embedded PR lesson: provide good service to influencers like Chris, which Twitter disproportionately includes, and get good coverage)
4. Humanizing the Head Honcho. @Zappos is rightly praised for his leadership here. That Jonathan Schwatrz’s Twitter stream is really just a TwitterFeed from his blog boggles the mind a bit.

More on that last point, it makes MUCH more business sense to get your non-blogging executives to microblog(/share) than to try to make them over into bloggers. It just integrates better with their lives, workflow and responsibilities, and offers many of the same benefits. Padmasree Warrior of Cisco is one of my favorite examples of this right now. (Look for a post about getting your executives to productively Twitter shortly.)

In honor of Mother’s Day… Knowing who exactly you help and what problems you solve can be used to “mom-proof” your networking spiel. These points apply equally to your presentations.

Would your mom, or any given relative, understand what you do? Does your family understand it? If your answer is “well, it’s much too technical,” brush up on features vs. benefits. Keep pushing until you find the real-world reason underlying the technicalities. Express it well enough that you and the people who know you can get it out briefly and easily.

I’m not suggesting you enlist the family for bus. dev., BUT since opportunity can arise anywhere, you need to keep your network conversant in “just what it is that you do”. Make it easy for the connectors in your life to think of you when they meet someone potentially interesting. Don’t make them do the figuring out.

If you can’t articulate what your contribution is, who will be able to repeat it on your behalf? If your audience can’t connect with your ideas, are they going to remember or pass them along?

Read John Windsor on the Value Proposition. “We help…” is a great opener. If it’s not all about the client, it’s not about the value you provide. Your efforts, your experiences, even your past successes are not the value you offer. Oh, and I’m not just talking to some of you. There’s no opting out, this applies to you whether you’re a maintenance worker or a VP of marketing. If you better understand the value you wish to sell in the marketplace, that selling will work out better for you.

Figure out exactly who you help, and what problems you solve for them.

Who do you help? Define this well, be specific. Be concise when you use it in your spiel, but first develop a detailed understanding of who they are and what is happening in their life at the time that they need you. I’m not saying you “have to niche” I’m saying think it through, and if uncertain, ask some current clients.

How? Directly, specifically state how you (your product, your service, etc.) improve their lives. What problems do you solve? What novel, good situations do you create? How exactly is their life better as a result? If you’re solving problems they don’t know they have yet, you’d better be especially good at this part.

Now go have fun out there

I have a rant about “competition” that in certain circles it’s an illusion. Once you get to the kernel of who *exactly* you serve and what *exactly* you are able to do for them, your offerings are unique.

This is a long journey and I can’t pretend I’m already there, but I know when I consider other providers of presentations advice, I get excited more than anything else, because we’re each building up a massive repository of knowledge that we can all use to serve a massive audience.

But I digress.

What do you do that’s different, and ergo, better, than anybody else? For whom do your efforts have the most value? Figure this out and prosper.

Inspired by a Seth Godin’s The Dip blog post just now: Seven Reasons You Might Fail to Become the Best in the World.

Circuitous, this. Caught this tip on Ben Casnocha’s blog and forwarded it to colleagues including Gina who blogged it. Now that my blog’s up I’m back-filling some entries I had been writing offline for the past few weeks.

If you’ve heard me (or others) rant about features vs. benefits and you think you have it, but it’s still a little tricky to sort through them, use this phrase after your “features”

“Which means that…”

…And then finish the sentence. Those are your benefits. (and in the jargon below, your USP or unique selling proposition…)

Source is someone named TW on a message board:

Re: USP Help continued…
If you’re still out there…Here’s an easy way to convert (read: uncover) your features into benefits. It’s also a way to uncover your one GIANT/VITAL benefit — upon which you can (+ should) hang your ENTIRE mrktng (for example, as Verizon has wisely done with the “It’s the network” usp).
It’s just three simple words —
_____________________
… which means that…
_____________________
Just insert that after each of your known features, and complete the sentence. If you still end up with a feature, just keep adding that phrase (”which means that…”) until you convert that feature into a benefit (remember, a feature is what you do/provide — a benefit is what they GET – classic example: waterproof boots — dry feet) By doing this, you’ll end up with a list of customer-oriented benefits (not features).
To get (uncover) your ONE vital benefit, just take all the benefits you uncover, and keep reducing each of THOSE down too — using the “which means that” phrase — when you do that, you may find that all the benefits boil down to ONE (the same) CORE BENEFIT. If they do, you’re in luck! You’ve now discovered the cornerstone of all your marketing msgs! Your USP. Consider having your USPs begin with the word “Get,” — as in, “You get…” Enjoy!– TW

Pretty darn good rule, as rules go. (Hint: I am not a fan of rules, except that knowing them allows you to break them productively…)

The Art Of Not Pitching Yes. what he said.

…

As a wise man (wise guy?) pointed out to me “no one buys from any pitches at all”.

YES.

But… Ineffective presentations, speeches and other pitches waste everyone’s time, slow things down and block opportunities. You don’t need to be “good” at presenting, you need to accomplish business objectives. Don’t get wrapped up in having to do a presentation. Don’t even get wrapped up in wanting to do the presentation “well”. Just get to the point by moving business forward. Speaking “well” is NOT your objective. Achieving value is.

Presenting is as presenting does. (and yes, haters of PowerPoint, PPT is as PPT does)

…

Great presentation of the day: Jim Valvano at the 1993 ESPY awards (tip of the hat to Ben Casnocha)
What do you think his objectives were? I know I came away with powerful, emotional ideas on the importance of time and a desire to help Cancer charities.

Witness the power these 9 minutes have over time and space, to influence us 14 years later. Why? Because this person said these things at this time to this audience. He OWNED why he was there, what he needed to accomplish and what he wanted to say. He also knew exactly which rules he wanted to break and why - how much more memorable his spirit (you think i’m afraid of 30 seconds?) made it.