How about you new parents out there ... do you experience pain in your neck and shoulders from carrying your baby?

Well if you do, you might consider taking an ibuprofen tablet to help sooth the symptoms.

This was the hope of pharmaceutical company McNeil Consumer Healthcare (part of Johnson & Johnson), makers of the Motrin brand ibuprofen tablets in the USA.

That's why in September they launched a major consumer campaign targeting new mothers with adverts in many national women's magazines and an online marketing campaign. What transpired is an excellent case study of how the groundswell of negative opinion, fuelled by the social internet, can kill sales and damage corporate reputation.

The hook for the campaign was the assertion that mothers carry their babies as fashion accessories, and since launching in print media in September, the company felt it was successfully connecting with new mothers through a shared experience.

That was until last week when they launched their online campaign. The ensuing backlash left McNeil pulling the entire programme and begging the vocal mommy-blogging community for forgiveness.

Bloggers and mothers using Twitter, the microblogging service, took exception to the condescending tone of the online advert. They were insulted by the implication that they use baby slings as a fashion accessory because it 'totally makes me look like an official mom'.

And, as bloggers tend to be, they were vocal in their outrage.

At the time of writing, Google Blogs turned up 202,726 mentions of Motrin, almost half of them posted in the last three days in reaction to the campaign and the related controversy.

The backlash really started to take hold on the evening the online campaign was launched, a Friday.

A freelance writer for National Lampoon and contributor to the Silicon Valley Moms Blog, Jessica Gottlieb took notice of the advert on Motrin's website and tweeted about it. She has more than a thousand followers on Twitter one of whom is Katia Presnal, a New York blogger who has more than 4,000 followers on Twitter, and she created a nine-minute video featuring outraged mothers and posted it on YouTube. It's been viewed more than 51,000 times.

The sad thing is, the McNeil marketing team remained blissfully unaware that all hell was breaking loose.

Having launched their initiative on a Friday, they shut down their computers at close of business and headed home for the weekend.

It wasn't until they returned to work on Monday morning that they became aware of the disaster that awaited. By then it was too late to fix it; the damage had been done.

They immediately removed the offending content from their website. In fact, their site was down for several hours, seemingly while they decided what to do. This served to further incite their critics who continued to blog their demands for an apology.

Then finally, one came from the VP of marketing, posted late in the day on Monday. 'We have heard you,' she said. 'On behalf of McNeil Consumer Healthcare and all of us who work on the Motrin brand, please accept out sincere apology... We are in the process of removing this ad from all media ... Thanks you for your feedback. It's very important to us.'

The thing is, they can't remove the ad from all media.

It's been embedded in thousands, maybe tens of the thousands of blogs all over the world, and it's unlikely many of the owners of those blogs will remove it. The ad will live forever online in infamy.

The other thing is, this can happen to you. The Motrin moms' backlash grew one blogger at at time and as the groundswell took hold, the collective influence of these mothers grew exponentially. The US national mainstream media has given massive coverage to the controversy, so people who don't even know how to turn on a computer are likely to be aware that 'Motrin Makes Moms Mad'.

If you think that social networks don't matter, pay heed.


>>Sherrilynne Starkie is the managing partner of Strive Public Relations, a strategic communications consultancy serving the Isle of Man. Visit her business blog, Strive Notes for frequent updates www.strivepr.com/notes or follow her on twitter.com/sherrilynne