A View from the Isle

Last night there was a Tazzu dinner in Yaletown where the big even of the night was going to be Tanya (Netchick) drawing the winner of her $500 cash prize for donating to her Team Diabetes run.

Tanya had the lovely Monica Hamburg do the draw (since she didn’t have any entries in, unlike John Chow with 52 and myself with 7) and she pulled Marketwire!

The funny thing is that everyone wanted to know who would be next and it Gus … who works at Marketwire and helped to get the sponsorship for Tanya!

Marketwire showed how cool they are by putting the money back in. It doesn’t end there because one of Tanya’s teammates Christine is about $1000 shy of her goal, so Tanya gave the money to her and is encouraging us to help her as well (yes, Tanya has indeed met her goal, hence the $500 give-away).

Nice. Great work everyone.

So Tanya are you going to live stream your run?

Read Tanya’s post: (Tanya aka NetChick) This Chick’s Life- » Marketwire wins… And so does Team Diabetes!

You can see my whole Flickr set from the evening below (I was borrowing a Nikon P6000 point-n-shoot from work last night):

It’s the weekend so a large company is going to get trashed on Twitter for a social media gaff. This week’s winner is Motrin.

Katja Presnal has a great summary (and the video that caused the uproar) on her blog and Mashable has a post by Sarah Evans giving some additional commentary on what went on but let me give you the short sentence version.

PR-advertising agency Taxi NYC made a site-promotion for Motrin targeted at mom’s who “wear” their babies (that is using a sling, snugglie, etc) that used a video clip that came off dismissive and patronizing at the same time. Twitter exploded with commentary last night, and it’s still going on today (check out this Twitter search for “motrinmoms”). Commentary is the polite way of saying “had their ass handed to them” because whoa I would not want to be the account manager for Motrin right now. Like Katja tweeted today:

“Motrin will take a lesser hit than their PR agency” by @skydiver
8 minutes ago from web

KatjaPresnal

[From Twitter / Katja Presnal: "Motrin will take a lesser ...]

Yes, McNeil hired Taxi NYC for the campaign, and they signed off on it (they had to and agency can’t blow their nose without three levels of regulatory approval when doing a pharma project), but I don’t place the place on the Motrin product managers. They don’t have time to figure all this stuff out, that’s what an agency is for. Yes, gut feel is important. Yes, I’ve seen projects get tanked by PMs because it was too close to the edge, but I think the blame rests firmly on Taxi for this one.

While this isn’t a social media campaign per se it became one as soon as it lit the Twitter-verse on fire. So where is Taxi in all this? There is a MotrinMoms Twitter account but as far as I can see they aren’t clued into the conversation about the campaign. There is no discussion with the thought leaders who are tweeting and writing about. The tweets are just, I don’t have a word for how bad, like fiddling while Rome burns.

There are so many great lessons here that I know I won’t catch them all, but here’s a good go at them:

• If you are the product manager at a company it’s time to have some basic education about social media
• When hiring an agency their social media savvy is a must check- must have.
• Agencies, you must be on point and monitoring the social media world from the moment a campaign goes live. You have to be read for anything
• If things are starting to go off the rails, reach out. Find the players and influencers and connect with them one-on-one. If they are big enough to have influence, they will be easy to find and contact.
• Agencies, if you don’t have social media specialists (or at least experts) on staff, time to hire some. Yesterday.

Dave Knox echoes these points in his post: “Congratulations Motrin. You just proved why every brand needs to understand Social Media ” and reminds me of Brian Solis’ post on crisis communications (which I can’t find at the moment). You can’t be blissfully ignorant of social media anymore. Brand managers, product mangers, agencies, you all need to step up and get a handle on the world of social media and how you work within it.

Go to a conference, check out a Third Tuesday, heck hire a social media consultant for a day or two for workshops (I’m available), because if you don’t you’re going to have a Monday like the folks at Taxi NYC and the Motrin brand team are going to have. Yeah they’re going to need some Motrin tomorrow.

Update: Just posted from Mathew Ingram and now Toby Bloomberg.

More updates: I missed in the first go round Laura (Pistachio) Fitton’s original post and GuruofNew

Feel free to leave more links in the comments.

Today is World Diabetes Day. Diabetes is something close to me. My Grandmother had it and died of the eventual complications.

Buzz Bishop has an auction going at 95Crave for some cool things:

[From 95Crave Auctions for World Diabetes Day | The Blog According to Buzz Bishop]

And he and Tanya Davis are running a freakin’ half-marathon in January to raise money for diabetes research.

I’ve donated, how about you?

Before I get into the story, I will start with: I’m okay.  I didn’t have a heart attack, I was thoroughly checked out at the hospital and sent home (at 2:00 AM).

And now the story…

Yesterday was relatively “normal” day for me, email, twitter, RSS, etc.  But towards the end of the day, I had buried the needle in my stress-o-meter in the red zone.  This should have been my first clue.

By evening, thoroughly stressed about life stuff (something I will elaborate on at MapleLeaf 2.0 shortly), I went to visit a friend for a bit.  On the way I started to have chest pains.  Uh oh.

Chest pains, then nausea, then trouble breathing, then my left arm started to feel funny.

Yes, you can see where this is going.

When I got to my friend’s house, intermittently clutching my chest and saying “no I think I’m okay”, I decided that I wasn’t okay and that a trip to the ER was in the offing for me.

I could still drive, but my friend came with me for moral support.

The rest of the evening (this was about 7:30 PM by this point) was as you’d expect.

First ECG (gotta love those sticky tabs), wait for the doctor to read it (I got to wait in the lounge and dressed thankfully), get called into the back (which means the hospital gown fun), hooked up to the heart monitor, IV started, little O2, lots more questions, blood taken, waiting, chest x-ray, waiting, another ECG, more blood taken, more waiting.

Pretty much by 10 PM I was feeling much better.  Chest pains were gone and I was feeling okay.  I was given the clean bill of health at 11:30, but they had to keep me there until 2 AM to do a confirming bit of blood work (turns out elevated heart enzymes often don’t appear for up to 6 hours post event).

I have to say that the nurses, doctors, and staff at Victoria General were awesome.  I was comfortable, kept informed, and treated with good humour and cheer.  It certainly helped me to relax.  Okay my b5 friends will also add that I was in rare comedic form last night, and that continued once the pain stopped.

In the end what was it?  The doctor’s weren’t 100%, but it wasn’t a heart attack or angina.  The likely culprit: stress.

Yep, stress.  So this is something I have to work on.  I have to learn to let go and relax.  Maybe even cut myself some slack and take a decent break occasionally.

So there it is.  My first heart scare.  I have to thank all my friends (I told a couple people at b5 that I was going) for their support.

So if I’m not posting a lot today, I’m giving myself a little break and time to reflect.

Just so you know.