Seems almost mandatory for me to write about the Motrin twitterstorm. (Dan has a good post here.) This is a perfect example of a gulf between a brand image (that ad) and what became a reputation crisis. Of course, agencies pushing out ads that the target audience doesn't find half as clever as the copywriter does, is tired news. The fascinating freshness, imho, is the power of the Hashtag.
"Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They're like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag."
By adding the hashtag #motrinmoms to their tweets, irate bloggers found each other and created a strong, searchable voice that outweighed its actual size. They got to the top of the "trending topics" on twitter (which is how the rest of us found them). Then, their blog posts feed mainstream media, and the results are history. Results literally, as in on Google for a long, long time to come.
It doesn’t matter exactly how many moms were angry enough to contribute. Or that other tag along bloggers (mostly the non baby wearing , male skewed demo, btw) thought they over reacted. The lesson here for our client brands is Hashtags. Keywords you can’t buy. Sounds like mandatory place to be.
Follow my hashtagging trail on twitter
One of the best things about the twitterverse is that new apps pop up to fill needs that the main system
candace kuss
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Member since: 03 Jun 2008
Last login: 05 Nov 2009
Total Posts: 80
