I’ve been involved in research tied to the principles of wikinomics for quote some time. Most of the stories that emerge tend to be positive in terms of the transformation taking place, both within the economy and society in general. But there is a definite dark side to it as well – one that I try to touch on every once in a while, but perhaps not enough. That dark side is that while openness, sharing and all the rest create many new opportunities, they can also lead to massive job losses, and destroy the business models that support things that are important to society – such as newspapers.

I was reminded of this today when I was enjoying one of my favorite diversions from work – a Sports Guy column. Bill Simmons, one of the most popular sports writers on the web, is a die-hard Boston Celtics fan, and the column was primarily about how the recent news that Kevin Garnett will be sitting out the playoffs. But in his second reaction to the story, he provided a great articulation of the hidden sub-story, centered around the fall of newspapers – and the journalists who find the real stories behind what’s going on.

As he points out, while professional sports in general shouldn’t be taken too seriously, they are important to a lot of people – and there would certainly seem to be enough interest in the topic to sustain a business of reporting on what’s happening. The Kevin Garnett injury story – he’s been sitting out for basically two months, while the team said all along he’d be back for the playoffs, and now it is clear he won’t be – is a big enough deal, particularly in Boston, that SOMEONE should have cracked this. But no one did – not even close. Everyone just talked about whatever the “official” message was, being managed by “official” sources.

Everyone knows the reason – newspapers are dying quickly as their business model evaporates. The economics just seem to not be working in terms of paying for people to do the digging anymore. Instead, what we end up with are more people like Bill Simmons – fabulously entertaining writers, offering their opinions on stuff on the web, but not doing REAL reporting.

And again as Simmons points out, the implications of this are not good. If nobody can crack the real story behind an injury to the top player on the defending champs in a sports-mad market with a massive target audience, who is going to crack all the other real stories that have far greater implications for society, but which people are generally even less likely to pay for? What does it mean when the economics behind finding the facts dissolve to the point where, on a micro level, no one seeks them out anymore – so on a macro level, we all end up shouting increasingly uninformed opinions back and forth at each other?

I know this isn’t a new topic, and millions of people are talking about it. But it’s something that really hits home with me, because when I dissect the issue it sure seems like how the principles of wikinomics are being applied here, an important part of society is falling apart, and there is no obvious solution for it. And as I referenced in the opening, it makes me think about some of the other problems wikinomics can cause as what LOOK to be positive things (more openness, transparency, sharing, efficiency, etc.) cause massive short-term, and maybe even long-term, dislocations in terms of employment, innovation, etc.

One example I’ve mentioned before on this front ties right back to that first story in Wikinomics – GoldCorp – and also applies to Innocentive, and a variety of others. Many of these examples boil down to winner-takes-all contests, where numerous people compete to create a solution, and only the winner (at the discretion of the company) gets paid. The economic case for companies to take such an approach is very, very strong – particularly in today’s economic climate. But what does it mean for society if the trend continues? While only paying for proven success looks good on short-term income statements, what are the long-term implications of the model? Will the number of people innovating shrink and shrink because everyone that doesn’t win doesn’t get paid, leading to less and less innovation, etc.?

There are many more I could ask, but I need to end it there. After all, this is just me offering an opinion on my blog, and there isn’t much of a business model in that right now either – have to get back to my real job.

Similar to the Intel logo thing, there’s another graphic I like to use to get people thinking about what prosumerism really means – a bit of a play on one of the more famous political speeches of all time:

Think about how dramatic of a mind-shift that could be for many companies – instead of solely focusing on being a producer / creator of value for others to consume, you become a platform that enables customers to create value for each other. There’s lots of interesting examples of this is the Web 2.0 space, but the idea also plays very well in the “real” world…

The ideas around prosumerism – particularly around customer co-creation – appear to be becoming ever more popular with companies, even if the term itself isn’t widely used. In addition to the Dilbert example I like to open presentations with (and part II of that series is coming soon), there’s another graphic I like to use that seems to resonate well with people. It’s a riff on the Intel Logo most people are familiar with:

Now of course we are not suggesting that companies adopt this approach entirely – having only customers inside, and only talent outside, makes absolutely no sense. However, I find it useful for discussions because over the last decade or so many companies have become quite comfortable with the “Talent on the Outside” portion, via strategies like outsourcing, the use of ideagoras, etc. However, from my experience while lots of companies talk about things like “customer engagement”, they generally haven’t really thought through what “Customer on the Inside” really means for them. Is it simply about getting feedback? Word-of-mouth advertising? Integrating customers in the innovation process? What about testing (i.e. beta launches), or strategies built around customization and true co-creation?

There are a lot of different opportunities that companies can consider and pursue, depending on what there strategy is, when they start thinking about bringing the “Customer Inside”. And similar to how Intel did a brilliant job de-commoditizing themselves by having PC purchasers know that there is Intel inside, many companies may find they can similarly differentiate the experiences they offer by adopting some “Customer Inside” strategies.

Last year I was blessed with the birth of my daughter (now 9 months old), and I wanted to come up with a special gift that both she, and her immediate family could enjoy for years. Given that I was working on some wikinomics-related research, I sat down to think about how I could put some of the principles into play to create a unique and interesting gift. What I came up with was a story book about the first two months of her life – and I thought I’d post the process here for others that might want to do the same. Here’s what I did – it’s fairly easy, and can be done at quite a reasonable cost.

Like a lot of new parents, I had a huge number of digital photographs of my daughter over the first two months of her life. While I was originally thinking of a simple picture book, I’ve always liked the look of sketch drawings – but I’m not really a great sketch artist. However, I stumbled upon a very cool site called befunky.com, where any photo can be turned into a sketch using the cartoonizer. I did about 40 of them, saved them to my hard drive, and I think the results were pretty impressive. Here’s an example of the output from my daughter’s first few minutes of life:

For my next step, I copied each of the pictures into a Microsoft Word file, and added some captions under them (with a page break in between each one, text centered on the page right under the picture). For example, the caption for the above picture was And then I got to meet my Dad! If I dare say so myself, he seemed awfully proud of both me and mom. The entire story was written from my daughter’s perspective, and covers major events of her first few months, and importantly pictures with almost every family member who came to visit (and a couple of friends as well).

With this word file in hand, the next step was quite simple as well – I went to Lulu.com, created an account, and uploaded the file. I chose the hardcover version ( more specifically, 6″ x 9″, casewrap-hardcover binding, white interior paper (50# weight), black and white interior ink, white exterior paper (80# weight), full-color exterior ink). The file was uploaded in exactly perfect format, I chose a green cover (where I threw on the title My First Two Months of Life), playing with it all until I had it exactly write. I could have put an image here as well, but opted for the simpler version:

So now I had it – a very professional looking, hardcover storybook covering the few first few months of my daughters life. I then purchased 20 copies for my daughter, close friends and family for a total cost of $272 – $237 for the books (or $11.85 each), $22.39 for shipping and handling, and $12.98 in taxes. They arrived at my door a few weeks later, and I can tell you for certain that everyone loved it – with the fact that most of the people who received the book also had a picture in the book with my daughter as an extra benefit.

So just an idea I thought I’d toss out there for people that might want to come up with a special gift for a child, loved one, etc. As an extra bonus, quite a few people that didn’t know very much about the wikinomics-related research I’d been doing started to understand it a little bit better… and having my daughter be a published author at two-months of age isn’t half-bad .

(and note: if you’d like to do something similar and need some help, just drop me a line).

For the last few weeks I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about the Keynesian “Paradox of Thrift“, which has become particularly relevant in today’s turbulent economy. As everyone knows by now, one of the driving forces of the problems revealed in 2008 was that consumers took on too much debt. The natural anecdote for this is for consumers to stop borrowing, and start saving – but that’s where the paradox lies. If everyone does that, aggregate demand will fall, the economy crashes, and the savings rate falls further still (also noting that when one saves by putting money in bank, it has to become debt for someone else in order to earn interest). Thus, we have a problem.

So it’s a case where doing what looks like the right thing for the long-term success of the economy has some perilous implications – at least in the short-term. In turn, it got me thinking about whether there is a similar, and potentially much larger, “Paradox of Wikinomics” as well. What I mean by this is that while application of the wikinomics principles might appear to  be the right thing for many companies and industries acting in their own self-interest, everyone adopting them at once could have similarly dire consequences – again, at least in the short-term.

In order to explain, let’s start again (also used in the wisdom of crowds vs. uniquely qualified minds post) with the first story in the book – GoldCorp. The gist was that the company ran a contest to find the best methods for identifying gold on their property, to great success. In theory, the methods they identified are probably the best for many such potential mines around the world. A logical extension would be that there are probably thousands upon thousands of people employed trying to discover ore deposits, that might very well now be redundant, if all similar companies adopted such approaches – transparency, information sharing, etc. – simultaneously. The old model, while less “efficient”, created more jobs.

So fine – one small subset of workers in the world potentially losing their jobs would barely cause a ripple in the global economy. But as you extend the principle of what made the GoldCorp story a success to other industries, such job loses can pile up. Other ideagoras (like Innocentive) would be an easy example, as companies start only paying for successful results (and a winner-takes-all economy takes hold) in R&D, while numerous people can no longer earn a living. But on a much larger scale, transparency and information sharing within the enterprise could make an extraordinary number of jobs redundant – jobs companies might be less resistant to cutting in the current economic climate than before. One easy example is “white collar grunt work” replaced by more effective, collaborative technologies – but there are many others.

And it of course doesn’t stop there. We’re already witnessing the demise of many newspapers, with the hyper-efficient Craigslist model being held responsible by many people. While I’m confident that the creation and dissemination of news will figure itself out again in the long run (and check out this excellent Clay Shirky interview for more thoughts on this), we’re seeing tremendous pressure on all creators of content tied to an advertising supported model. As the popularity of social media continues to increase, I expect that this trend will continue – and a lot of current jobs will be threatened.

I could go on, but I think you get my point by now. In the long run, what drives the wealth and success of an economy is productivity and efficiency. In my opinion, many of the principles of wikinomics continue to hold the promise of an extraordinary amount of efficiency and productivity to be unleashed, which should/ could have amazing long-term benefits. But in the short to medium term, I see the potential for a very difficult paradox – what makes the economy more efficient and productive as a whole causing a major dislocation of workers, who as we all know are also the consumers, and as they have less to spend the economy potentially shrivels up in a way similar to the paradox of thrift.

Given that the tagline of wikinomics is that mass collaboration changes everything, this dislocation could be on such a scale to make it a much tougher paradox to deal with. In such a case, the challenge is to ensure that the wave of innovation that can be unleashed through applying the wikinomics principles creates enough economic growth, and jobs, to compensate – and make sure the displaced workers can be re-trained to do them.

There is a long-held belief in professional sports that the best athletes often make the worst coaches. The reason for this is simple – elite performers often have a natural ability to perform that there lesser counterparts do not possess, and in turn they are unable to really understand how to coach and develop their less talented peers. In turn, it is often the mediocre players (those that had to get every last ounce of output from their limited ability in order to forge a career), or even those who are never able to go pro, that are more suited for coaching – because they really understand what the majority of players need in order to succeed, and what makes them click.

What got me thinking about this is that a lot of people are wondering what 2009 holds for social media, and Twitter in particular. Over the last year or so Twitter has exploded in popularity, and had over 3 million active accounts in late 2008. Within this group are numerous social media experts that have emerged as leaders, and they are remarkable on many levels. It is not uncommon for them to have thousands of followers, follow thousands of others, be active every few minutes from the time they wake up to the time they go to bed, and seamless integrate it with their other social media activities throughout the day. For those looking in from the outside, it can truly be a dizzying amount of activity.

Looking out over the next year, many people are trying to guess how popular Twitter will become – for example, Sean Moffitt has put the over/under for users at the end of 2009 at 25 million. If usage gets into this ballpark, I think it’s fair to say the platform is moving beyond the mavens and the connectors into the mainstream. But my question is whether how these people use the platform will be different, and how applicable the lessons from the leading twitter users will be.

I personally think the how will be quite different, and it sort of connects back to the athlete analogy. As Twitter usage expands, more and more of the people engaging with it won’t see participating in “constant conversations” throughout the day as natural… or maybe even useful. And they’d certainly be overwhelmed with the prospect of trying to track thousands of different streams of information. There are two groups that I’m particularly interested in on this front:

1. “Introvert” thinkers. As Tracey commented on my related August 8th post (Social Media for the anti-social), Twitter is particularly attractive to those that like to “think out loud.” Many other people aren’t like that – they like to close themselves off from the world to do their thinking, and then re-connect when they believe they have something to say, and tend to generally move a little slower than the mavens of the twitter world. I think I fall mostly in this category, and have found it leads me (I believe) to use Twitter a little differently than many of the power users. I find the most value from search.twitter.com, where I seek out links to blog posts and other more detailed analysis of issues I am interested in. For the most part, I find the “conversational” tweets from even the people I follow, many of whom I find to be quite brilliant, relatively useless for how I work. Though I am changing a bit on this front, I can’t ever see a day where I’m 1/10th as active as the most engaged Twitter users.

2. Non-Web Workers. I don’t really like this name for the group, but it represents the mass of people who aren’t tethered to a computer (or other internet enabled device) all day. Some of these people are knowledge workers of some sort, and many others are not – and there connection to the WWW may be limited to a couple of times a day, and their “free time” after work. I would speculate that some of my thoughts about “introverted thinkers” might go a step further here – they might not be looking for conversations at all. What they might be looking for, however, are valuable links to content, information, and services relevant to them – making Twitter a little more of a “broadcast” platform than many people currently consider it to be. There are already hints of this – for example, Al Gore has 23,158 followers, and follows exactly one other Twitter account (Current TV, which he is a part of).

Now again much if this is just speculation, but the underlying belief is that the next stage of growth for Twitter will involve a mass of people that might use the service entirely different than their predecessors, many of whom (from my experience) focus on it’s value as a conversational medium. Those that are currently most active and in tune with the site are extremely well-positioned to monitor any evolving trends here, and offer valuable advice for individuals and companies seeking to get the most out of the platform. However, I suspect that some of these leaders may fall into the trap of believing everyone should use the platform like they do – and in the process show how sometimes the most proficient social media users (think: best athletes) can make the worst instructors (think: coaches).

Hello, and welcome to my new site. For most of the last few years I’ve been active on other websites and communities, most notably wikinomics. While I will continue to do so, this site is going to become the central hub for my activity. For your interest, I have uploaded some of my favorite wikinomics posts from the past year, and back dated them so they fall in the archives at the appropriate time. Hope you enjoy.

Regular readers know that “prosumerism” – when consumers become actively involved in the creation of the goods and services they consume – is my primary research topic right now. Back in October I wrote about a piece I was working on called Broadcasting yourself: How important is it to YouTube’s Success? One of the key findings of this research was that while YouTube’s tagline indicates the site’s popularity is driven by prosumers creating content for each other, the reality appears to be that  “traditional media content” – snippets from TV programs, music videos, and the like – is far more important.

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that prosumers aren’t an important part of the site. I got to thinking about this again when I read the recent NY Times piece YouTube Videos Pull in Real Money. It’s a story about how some of YouTube’s partners are now starting to make serious money from ads served on the original videos they create – with the feature story being about Michael Buckley, who has created his own celebrity chatter show.

Michael’s story looks like a classic case of prosumerism – he was an administrative assistant at a music production company who started producing a thrice-weekly (self described) “silly” show, after investing $2,000 in a camera, $6 on a piece of fabric for a backdrop, and bit more in a couple of lights. His silly show became quite popular after a full year of concerted effort, and he now receives an average of 200,000 views per video, while the most popular get millions. Now a funny thing has happened – he’s becoming so successful, and making so much money, he’s quit his other job and is now devoted to it full time.

So this leads to a simple question – is Michael a prosumer or not? I would personally argue that he was, but he isn’t anymore. After all, it’s now his full-time job – there is no fuzzy line. In turn, this brings an interesting dynamic to prosumerism on YouTube – as the business model sorts itself out on the site, it might not so much empower prosumers (because most aren’t popular enough to make an real money), but to allow the most popular prosumers to turn into full-time producers – a subtle but important difference.

As I note in my research, this is leading to an interesting dynamic. It’s a common belief that YouTube represents a shift away from the “few to the many” broadcast model to a “many to the many”, or even “many to the few” (each with their own piece of a long tail). However, combine the views for these popular prosumer-turned-producers with the traditional media content on YouTube, and the model continues to look a heck of a lot like “few to the many” to me.

And that’s not a bad thing – in fact I think it’s great, as YouTube effectively creates a meritocracy where anyone with a good idea and presentation style, a couple of thousand bucks to invest, and the willingness to dedicate themselves to building an audience, can earn their just rewards. Though it is not neccesarily so great for established media companies of course…

Last week I wrote about the Motrin Mom fiasco, and then spent a fair bit of time thinking about the best way for a company to respond to the backlash that can so quickly emerge in the blogosphere (My favorite idea was a “You think you have a headache? You should see what we’ve had to deal with over the last week…” video response). Then at 2:24 on Friday afternoon I received an email from a reader that stated he’d seen Ryan Holiday’s post about me about a few days ago, and nicely indicated that he found it really rude and quite off-base (before sharing a really neat story I hope to write about this week).

After reaching for a Motrin myself, I decided to check out what he was talking about. The article he was referring to was this one- The Worst Thing About Blogs. In the post, Ryan lumped my recent story about Starbucks’ wikinomics-enabled marketing success story with other posts from the likes of Guy Kawaski, Hugh Macleod, Steve Rubel, and Michael Arrington, with the lead-in sentence of (The Worst Thing About Blogs) is that they never let reality get in the way of a good post. Ryan then concluded his post with the following:

If we can deduce anything from the blogs above, it also makes you 1) Sound like an idiot 2) Act like an asshole 3) Always get it wrong

So it’s fair to say he wasn’t a fan of the post. As I read through the comments (some in support of his POV, others defending the posts including my own), Ryan again highlighted my post as particularly egregious, and for good measure pointed out again that it sucked. The reason he gave is that we don’t live in a vacuum – I can’t / shouldn’t be writing about only the Starbucks marketing story when there is another huge thing going on (Starbucks’ recent report of a 97% drop in profits).

So at that point, I had to decide what to do. In turn, I thought I’d share my thought process, and what came of it, since it might be helpful for other people and companies dealing with similar situations. You can see my first comment on his post (last I checked it was 4th from the bottom).

1. Decide whether to engage or not. The blogosphere, and particularly the comment sections, is notorious for maliciousness. As a general rule, if a writer starts dropping insults like “idiot” and the aforementioned a-bomb, I tend to prefer to just stay away. But this seemed like a special case. Ryan seemed like a fairly intelligent person, who’s job appears to be in relation to PR and social media, so I was intrigued by not only the message he chose to send, but how he chose to send it. And whether I liked it or not, based on the volume of comments it seemed like a fair number of people were reading it – so there could be direct benefit from engaging in the conversation.

2. Timeliness versus “Coolheadedness”. As another general rule, I tend to prefer to “sleep on” such issues, in order to avoid a hasty response that I might later regret. However, in this situation I was also dealing with a timeliness issue – popular blog posts can fade away quite quickly, and as I mentioned it was already Friday afternoon. I knew I had neither the time nor inclination to look at this on the weekend, and a Monday response might be a little too late, so I opted for an immediate response. Always dangerous.

3. Cede the point versus defend myself. All of us make mistakes. When faced with a criticism, it is of course important to decide whether you think the complaint is valid and cede the point, or instead defend your POV – noting that sometimes you can do a little of both and find some common ground. In this case, I felt Ryan was quite off base, and decided to actively defend my POV.

4. Choose the tone of the response. When someone is directly saying you sound like an idiot and act like an asshole, it is quite easy to fall into the trap of responding in a similar manner (hence, my “sleep on it” rule of thumb). I wanted to ensure my tone was different – a little more thoughtful and respectful. However, I did start my response with “As the idiotic a-hole who wrote the blog post on wikinomics, I thought I should respond to your criticisms”, so I didn’t fully succeed on this front. But if you read the rest of my comment, I think you’ll find it fair, reasonable, and respectful.

5. Respond directly to the criticism. In this case, I re-articulated what I understood his exact complaint to be, and responded directly to that. This helps to keep the response directly on-topic, instead of meandering into a variety of other tangential subjects, and helps make sure there is a common understanding of the “topic” both people can refer to. In other words, if I misunderstood, my misunderstanding would be clear and he could respond in kind.

6. Demonstrate knowledge in the area (if applicable). In this case it was fairly easy – in a former life I worked for one of Starbucks’ prime competitors in Canada (Second Cup), know a lot about their strategy and business model, and can talk at length about them on demand. I felt that briefly demonstrating I had this knowledge helped set-up my argument for why I chose not to share it in this particular situation.

7. Ask the critic to back himself up. In this case, it was again easy. Ryan was making a direct complaint about what others wrote in their blogs, on his blog. In turn, I asked a simple question – “if you scan through you last 20 blog posts, do you believe they stand up to the bar you have set for others here? Does each one represent high-level thinking, and provide full perspective on all the issues at play?” You can tell from the question what I think the answer is, but the bigger point is that a well phrased question, on-topic, can be valuable to the response. If Ryan can’t defend his POV by using his own posts, he’s clearly got another issue to deal with here.

8. Get a peer review. This one is self-explanatory, and is particularly valuable if you pass on the “sleep on it” option. However, in this case I didn’t go through a peer review process.

I think that covers most of it. So how did it work out? Well, it’s hard to say. After I posted my response the comments section on his post was basically dead, but I can’t necessarily claim responsibility for that – the post was now several days old, and we were heading into the weekend. But it is perhaps notable that of the two comments that followed, one was from a person admitting they didn’t understand most of the blogs he referenced, and the other (perhaps picking up on my question) indicated Ryan’s post should be added to the list of posts Ryan was complaining about.

Ryan himself didn’t respond to my comment on his blog. He did, however, send me an email. This message was notable on several fronts. Perhaps most importantly, there was an absence of inflammatory terms, which either indicates a subtle shift in his thinking, or that it’s more difficult to say such things to someone directly than when referring to someone you’ve never met on a blog. He also re-affirmed being a fan of the book itself.

Ryan also generally stuck to his POV, and re-articulated it in a slightly different / better way. Notable inclusions were that my post was kind of like enthusiastically writing about Nero playing the lyre while fires raged in Rome, and that my not acknowledging the strategic decay of the company within my Starbucks story was almost negligent.

In my mind, this puts us in a much better space. I’m fine with relatively cordial disagreements and differing POVs, and even noted in my response to Ryan that based on what I can piece together about his story Don might be interested in talking to him (think Wikinomics meets Grown Up Digital). However, my POV has not changed, and to sum up this now exceedingly long post I will share three points I made as to why I felt it was not important to put the other strategic issues in perspective in my piece. If you disagree, feel free to share below – but please keep the swearing to a minimum .

The first is an issue we have to deal with regularly in our research. Often times the best examples on the “bleeding edge” of innovation are being done by companies (start-ups and old alike) that have fundamental and fatal flaws in other respects. Some of our best research comes when the rest of the world is focusing on how Rome is burning, but we manage to find a “Nero playing the lyre” that not only other companies can learn from, but they might otherwise not hear about (because everyone is focused on the fire). The challenge for the reader is then to triangulate that information with everything else they know about the situation to draw their own conclusions.

Second, it’s important to remember the context in which a particular piece is being presented. We have heard complaints from readers if/when we stray off-topic on our site – the brand “wikinomics” indicates what type of information they expect. When we write about particular companies, it is perspective on the “wikinomics” part of their strategy and initiatives that people want to hear about. If they want to read about the other aspects of (for example) Starbucks, there are literally hundreds upon hundreds of stories covering 97% drop in profits and associated issues in Google News. If I search for Starbucks Lexicon, there are three hits, and none of them are on topic. It is by telling that wikinomics-related story few others are talking about that we create value for readers and keep them coming back.

Finally, space constraints are an important consideration. The piece I wrote was a little over 300 words. When you write short pieces, as I’m sure you well know the blogosphere demands, it is generally crucial to maintain a laser focus on a fairly narrow topic – every word giving context or providing background is a word that’s not being used to describe the issue at hand. Not everything is supposed to, or can, present the “big picture”… or it would be like boiling the ocean every time you want to make a pot of spaghetti.

I love it when my work and personal life serendipitously collide – as has happened today in a very interesting way.

I’m blessed with having a wonderful 7-month old daughter at home, and her equally wonderful mother taking care of her. The latter has some very strong opinions on parenting, and in particular when companies try to send messages that dissuade mothers from doing certain things that, say, thousands of years of history and an extraordinary number of experts indicate are good things to do. In turn, I don’t really have to imagine how she might have reacted to the growing Motrin Mom controversy. (Editor’s note: Said mom has since read this post and viewed the video, and the words “pissed off” were prominently featured in her response).

For those that might have missed it, the video ad (which can be seen on YouTube) presents the following text (bold added by me): Wearing your baby seems to be in fashion. I mean, in theory it’s a great idea. There’s a (whole bunch of different types of carriers), and who knows what else they will come up with. Supposedly, it’s a real bonding experience. They say that babies carried close to the body cry less that others, BUT what about me?  Do mom’s that wear their babies cry more than those who don’t?  I sure do. These things put a ton of strain on your back, your neck, and your shoulders. Did I mention your back? I mean I’ll put up with the pain because it’s a good kind of pain. It’s for my kid. Plus, it totally makes me look like an official mom. So if I look tired and crazy, people will understand why.

Motrin, of course, is pain medication. The message above is not-so subtly trying to indicate that carrying babies is a “fashionable”, badge-of-honor type sacrifice to make – perhaps like drinking a Starbucks Vente latte, but with, er, sacrifice. As referenced, I know at least one person that’s VERY well educated on this subject that would probably object to this message (two if you include me) – let’s just say we’d drop things like “supposedly” out of the sentences above. Based on the brewing reaction described in articles like this one, we are hardly alone. After a big PR disaster, the commercial has since been pulled from broadcasts, apologies have been issued, etc. Rather cutely, on the Motrin site the ad has been replaced with the message “we have heard you.”

If you read my posts over the last few months, the intersection with my work here is obvious – I’m keenly interested in how the world of social media is affecting advertising, and the role of particularly important “N-Fluencers” in driving community action. I also wrote about an AdAge story earlier today, and I was happy to find AdAge also has the best account of how a few influential bloggers and twitters suddenly galvanized to bring this ad down – amazing details of how the message and uproar spread, and interestingly quite a long time after the initial ad was launched. And the following quote from story speaks directly to the media question I was asking earlier:

“You don’t have to have thousands of followers to start something like this. Many people with small networks have just as much influence as a few people with large networks.”

I suppose I should also note that I first stumbled upon this story reading something called a “newspaper” over lunch – I’m telling you this thing was coming at me from all angles!

So I agree with all the articles and commentators who are noting that this is a great example of the power of social media, and how it’s becoming increasingly impossible for companies to ignore. Though I do find one other thing to be interesting here. In truth, we’ve been through a ton of different baby carriers at our house, that we both use all the time. In truth, a lot of them (but not all) actually do cause my back to hurt a bit, and I think the realities of strapping a 21 pound and growing person to my stomach and carting her around for hours will lead to a little more pain now and again. In turn, why on earth would a company promoting pain medicine want to run a sequence trying to position baby carrying as a “fashionable” thing you should “supposedly” do (i.e. stop doing it)?

Me thinks the mistakes on this campaign run quite deep, and a fair bit of damage has been done. But how much I wonder? And does a company that presents a poorly thought out ad, but retracts it and apologizes after a storm of responses (i.e. shows they are actually listening), end up better or worse off than before?