This week two articles caught my attention. The first one involved Johnson and Johnson and the Motrin ad fiasco. The second one was about the cooperation between Google and P&G around innovation.

On Sep. 20, McNeil Consumer Healthcare launched a new campaign to target Motrin at mothers. The message was perceived to be irreverent and snarky by a mom viewing this ad last weekend. She immediately sent out a tweet about it and it unleashed a groundswell of disgruntlement over the ad. Withinn 48 hours, thousands of tweets and Youtube videos have appeared expressing unhappiness over the ad. Meanwhile, JNJ has apologized and pulled down the ad from their website. All this happened over a weekend! Did JNJ run this by their typical process and used feedback from focus groups? Did something totally unexpected happen here?

The second story was equally interesting. Google employees get (?) new media but do not understand traditional branding techniques. P&G managers understand their brand but did not know enough about leveraging the new media. To fix this problem, these two companies have decided to exchange employees and allow them to participate in one another's meetings on innovation. The hope is that by learning from one another, they can avoid fiascos like the one with Motrin.

Both these stories highlight the fact that we really don't understand how to use social media to promote our brands. Was the Motrin backlash the result of a small group having powerful network reach and being vocal enough to express their frustration? How do we anticipate these reactions? Or, more importantly, how do we react to it? Each experiment results in unanticipated consequences that provide many lessons. The Motrin episode is one of many such that we should track and learn from.