What probably seemed clever in the mind of a 23-year-old, childless copywriter turned out to be quite offensive to many moms (and dads, to be sure) and unleashed a social media firestorm.

Within a few short hours, a movement was born, complete with its own #motrinmoms hashtag on Twitter, angry blog posts, video rants, CafePress stores, Flickr groups and parody videos. In less than a day, Motrin was forced to take down the ad and apologize.

• Morriss Partee has published a chronology of events.
• Enterprise Social Media has assembled a Harpers-like index of Motrin Moms activity, which also gives a good sense of how quickly, from Motrin’s point of view, this whole thing got out of hand.
• Jack Neff covers the incident in Ad Age.

Update:
My biz partner Dean Gulstad points out an article by Jakob Nielsen on participation inequality, which supports Neff’s view that Motrin acted too hastily in responding to the social media uproar. Nielsen points out that “In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.” Therefore, he says, “If your company looks to Web postings for customer feedback on its products and services, you’re getting an unrepresentative sample.”

Yet another update:
Seth Godin pans Motrin’s apology for its lack of humanity.

• Graeme Thickins, of DoApp and Tech~Surf~Blog fame, ponders whether using Twitter is decreasing his blogging activity. He also points to an early post on this topic by Ryan Block of Engadget: Does Twittering mean you blog less? The answer might surprise you. Personally, I’ve been seeing the effect on my own blogging. Heck, it’s way easier to spit out a 140-character tweet than to do the thinking, research and linking required for a readable blog post.

• Best Buy embraces Web 2.0 by announcing its Remix API. If, as Brad Stone’s NYT report suggests, this is part of a larger movement by legacy organizations to make their data publicly available, I think we’re in for some fun. Other recent and notable API releases include National Public Radio’s Open API, MTV’s Content API and Apple’s iPhone API.

• Speaking of the big-box retailer with the yellow, tag-shaped logo… From the irritatingly successful 4-Hour-Workweek author Timothy Ferriss, we learn that Best Buy has implemented a Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) with amazing results. Specifically, they claim a 41% increase in productivity at HQ and a 90% reduction in employee attrition in some biz units. What’s ROWE? Ferriss finds out by interviewing Cali Ressler, the 20-something BBY employee who introduced ROWE from the bottom up and went on to write about the concept in Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It. Read Tim Ferriss’: “No Schedules, No Meetings — Enter Best Buy’s ROWE”

  Update: Daniel Pink has an interview with Ressler and Thompson (Part 1 | Part 2)

• 3 Tips for a Great Landing Page - Landing page. Now, there’s a term, along with “microsite,” that ushers you right back to the heyday of Web 1.0. But for many marketers in Fortune 500 companies – who need 6 months lead time to put content on the corporate Web site – a microsite is still a valid tactic for supporting online and offline marketing campaigns.

• David Meerman Scott, speaking at the Inbond Marketing Summit, tackles the social media ROI question by asking, “What’s the ROI of putting on your pants in the morning?” and “What’s the ROI of the army of Guatemalan landscapers now raking the bushes around the building?” (via @desarev)

• And as long as we’re listening to gurus rip it up at conferences, be sure to check out Gary Vaynerchuk’s short, but intense keynote at the recent Web 2.0 conference in NYC. You might want to your volume down, as Gary gets excited and lets the effenheimers fly now and then.

social media

But despite the mounting curiosity, there’s still not much action on the part of mid-size to large companies.

Waiting and seeing
I can see why some folks are taking a wait-and-see approach to social media. If you wait, other folks will figure out some things for you. One or two leaders in your industry will make a big move and you’ll be able to see whether they fail or succeed. And eventually, some kind of broad consensus will emerge regarding how companies should engage with the user-generated Web.

I believe a consensus already is coalescing, but it exists mostly among brand-me and small-business owners, technology gurus, forward-thinking marketers and their followers – some of the same people who advised us that businesses should embrace the Web way back in the mid 90s. And boy were they right, even if we had a bubble and a hiccup along the way.

An emerging consensus
The emerging consensus on social media simply says that now is the time to jump in. Now is the time to play, to experiment, to make your mistakes and start to form your own professional opinions about which domains (blogging or microblogging, podcasting, wikis, social-networking, etc.) are the most productive and instructive for your company. All while it costs you next to nothing. Think of it as a free or cheap form of education, since very few of these mediums require a huge investment.

In the same way that nobody questions the need for a company to have its own Web site anymore, I believe in a couple years we’ll be at the point where nobody will question the need for companies to be engaged, in some form, in the millions of conversations taking place every minute on the social Web. Not just because a growing number of customers will expect it, but because it could come to represent one of the lowest-cost means of connecting with people who are predisposed toward your products and services.

Price to play
What might you expect to spend getting your feet wet in social media? The good news is that participation is free. It doesn’t cost you a thing to set up a blog (start with Blogger), a Flickr account, a Facebook or MySpace account or a Twitter account. If you’re reluctant to put your company’s name out on Facebook, just set up your own personal account first and see how it goes. Oh, did I mention? Unlike some forms of marketing research, it’s lots of fun!

Now, if you think you’re ready to dip your toes in the tub, but you can’t spare any FTEs, or even a portion of an FTE, consider sloshing over just a little of the cash you’re blowing on TV, radio and print ads.

• For the cost of producing and buying a print ad in a trade pub, you could hire a consultant to establish a passive presence on all the major social networks – or, better yet, an active presence on a couple of select networks!
• For the cost of a radio spot, you could hire a team to build and help you feed your blog for a year.

If you want to get serious and be prepared for the media of the future, you just might have to borrow a little from the media of the past.

Yeah, but what’s my ROI?
With some companies spending money is not the issue, but justifying the spend is. Consequently, I hear a lot about ROI: “What’s the ROI of blogging?” “What’s the ROI of being on Twitter?” And quite honestly, that’s a tough one. For instance, I can’t tell you if this blog has literally resulted in revenue for my business. But I do know that in some cases, we couldn’t have won the job without it. The blog was one of seveal critical pieces that contributed to the sale.

As you think about what kind of return you might expect from social media, keep in mind that the ROI could be entirely qualitative. Comcast maintains a Twitter account, @Comcastcares, staffed by a real guy, Frank Eliason, which they use to monitor conversations about Comcast and then to intervene when a disgruntled customer needs personal service. The ROI? Probably pretty lackluster from a pure financial point of view. But then again, what is their reputation worth to them? And how is that reputation built, if not one conversation at a time. So, what is it worth to Comcast to have thousands of influential technology aficionados – the same people you ask for help when your computer or high-speed Internet goes on the blink – see that Comcast is staffed by real people who actually appear to care?

Give ROI a vacation
Ultimately, it’s not for me or any other consultant to predict what ROI you should expect. The whole question of ROI is an evolving conversation that I believe needs to be left as a big question mark – for now. And given how cheap it is to do social media, why put so much pressure on it to earn its keep? Your company’s potted plant budget is probably ten times more than what you’ll spend on social media…and what’s the ROI on that?

The danger is that if you approach this medium with an immediate need for gain, or to monetize it somehow, you might not have the sensitivity to see how online communities are driven not by taking so much as giving. Yes, it’s a very hippie sentiment, but guess who’s running Web 2.0? Grown up hippies and their philosophical offspring! The point is that in order to thrive in any medium, you need to understand that medium’s unique rules and mores. If you don’t your marketing could come off as clumsy and self-serving and you won’t be able to build a community around your product or service.

One way forward
I know a number of marketing managers who are already familiar with social media and are eager to jump in, but they want to do so thoughtfully. They’re looking for a framework that will lend some sense of professionalism and planfulness to their social media efforts. Fair enough.

If that’s you, let me suggest that your initial success and longer term ROI on the social web will hinge on these three things:

1. Your social media persona – Do you have a clear understanding of who your company is and what it stands for in word and deed? Perhaps you’ve explored this territory in a recent branding effort. If so, dig up the dusty brand book and see what it tells you. Ultimately, you want to determine whether your company is a teacher, a helper, a connector or a [insert a personality type here].
2. Your imagination and sense of play – This is all fairly uncharted territory with very few precedents and formulas to latch onto. You might see that as a curse. I see it as a blessing. It means that the playing field is fairly level. Are you a small bank? You have just as good odds of beating out the top banks to become a real player in social media. There are many right answers and many ways to capitalize on this sea change in online behavior. But you’ve got to explore and find them.
3. Trial and error – Since there’s no script or formula to guide you, it’s reasonable to expect that some things you try might fail or succeed underwhelmingly. Maybe you’ll build an application on Facebook that attracts just 50 installs. Don’t fret. Tweak it and see what happens. With your social media persona as your guide, look for another way to act out your company’s role oline. You’re making omelets, so just commit up-front to breaking some eggs!

Get help if you need it
Of course, you’re not entirely on your own. Without spending a fortune, you could hire a social media consultant to shortcut your learning curve. A consultant could help you clarify your company’s social media persona and explore the many ways that could translate into actions. Or simply help you narrow the field and point you to some sites or networks that your company should consider first.

But ultimately, you have to take a first step, which might be as simple as bringing up the topic with your boss. Perhaps you need to lay out the alternatives:

• Your can jump into social media now while there’s still time to experiment, learn and lead.

OR

• You can wait until everyone else does it and be forced to jump in with little forethought. Because the landscape will be more defined and some of your competitors may have already set a high barrier to entry, you may not have the luxury of picking your battles. When we do achieve this “critical mass” I believe it’s going to be a mad rush. To paraphrase wine and marketing celeb Gary Vaynerchuck: You think social media is big now? Just wait until Oprah gets on Twitter!

It was my cousin Rosa who suggested a trip to the Amazon as a way of salvaging our vacation. I was hesitant at first. For some reason, the jungle never appealed to me nearly as much as the mountains. With all the ancient ruins and adorable Quechua-speaking villagers, the mountains are a dream come true for the frustrated anthropologist and archaeologist in me.

Women of the Bora tribe, performing for tourists. Photo by Sarah Gillespie.

Yet, as I learned two years ago, and was reminded on our trip last week, the “story” of the Amazon jungle is very much a human story. As amazing and abundant the wildlife is, what fascinates me even more are the families that live along that Amazon, Napo and countless tributaries, eking out a living from the water and the forest.

Floating houses along a backwater of the Amazon. Photo by Sarah Guagliardo

There are very few roads in the South American jungle. For instance, Iquitos, a city of 500,000, is not connected to the rest of Peru by pavement. If you want to visit or escape Iquitos, you have two choices: plane or boat. Since virtually nobody can afford to fly, boats are the preferred mode of transportation, whether the destination is Lima (a few hundred kilometers upriver to Pucallpa and then 20 hours by bus) or just to the next village.

So, in essence, the rivers are the highways of the jungle. And like any road, the rivers of the Amazon basin are busy with traffic, from large, double-decker steamships (well, they’re not steam powered anymore, but have changed little in form since the days when they were!) to long, motorized canoes called peque-peque because of the sound they make as they sputter up and down the river. The humblest river craft is a dugout canoe, that even the poorest jungle dweller owns. It rides very low in the water. When laden with an entire family, it looks like it is on the verge of being swamped or capsizing. But knowing how to balance in a dugout canoe is an essential life skill that is second nature. As our guide explained, children in the jungle learn to canoe, swim and handle a machete at a very early age.

Boy playing in dugout canoe. Photo by Sarah Guagliardo

At first glance, you might think that the banks of the Amazon are solid walls of forest. But as you near the shore, you discover that the river is lined with villages, towns and farmsteads of varying sizes. One dead giveaway: clumps of shiny, broad banana leaves. presence of banana plants, which usually indicate a current or recent homestead.

The day’s catch: catfish and sugar cane. Photo by Sarah Gillespie.

Along the river, people are can be seen nearly everywhere, fishing, washing clothes, cutting wood, tending animals or simply hanging around. In bigger towns, some people live in luxurious concrete homes. But that’s an exception, as the annual flooding of the river will inundate any home that isn’t on high ground. Thus, the vast majority of homes are fairly open structures made of wood and raised up on stilts.

Girl with sloth. Photo by Sarah Gillespie.

As a parent, I can’t help but to the notice the children. They are nearly all adorable, with beautiful, dark brown skin of many shades and with different looks that hint at differences in tribal origins. Unlike the mountains, where the primary indigenous language is Quechua and most people of native origin call the Incas their ancestors, the people of the jungle come from dozens, if not hundreds of different tribes, each with their own language and customs. Except for the fact that they share a common waterway, similar foods and a country called Perú, many jungle dwellers are foreigners to each other.

A note about the photos: Sarah Gillespie and Sarah Guagliardo are two American women that we met at Heliconia Amazon Lodge. They kindly consented to let me use their photos for this post. I would have wanted have used my own, except that when reviewing my photos I noticed that I didn’t have a single usable photograph of people from the jungle. How odd, given the very premise of the post. But upon some reflection I realized that I am rather gun-shy with my camera and reluctant to thrust a camera in front of locals. Of course it’s all in how you approach it. There are polite and appropriate ways to take pictures of strangers. It’s something I’ll have to work on next time!

• Hunting for megalodon teeth with Desert Man of Ica, who was recently written up in the New York Times. (Fortunately, we made our reservation before he became famous!)
• Shooting video in some remote (as in no electricity and little Spanish spoken) Quechua villages above Ayacucho for Fundación Comunidad.
• Meeting with Minka Fair Trade to see what interesting and marketable fair-trade products Peru might have to offer.
• Above all, showing my 10-year-old son, Sam, why the ancestral lands keep calling me back.

To that last point, below are a few glimpses of Peru’s many landcapes. For a really nice slideshow, I recommend searching on “Peru landscape” at Compfight, a great tool for searching on Flickr.

Sunrise in Machu Picchu, by thecsman

Lago Huacarpay, by Don Ball

Dunes outside Ica, by Don Ball

Streets of Pisaq, by Don Ball

Islas Ballestas, by Don Ball

Miraflores by night, by Don Ball

Paccha River Valley from above, by Fundación Comunidad

Nanay, rio Nanay, by pierre pouliquin

Cordillera Central, by La Cronista de los Andes

When you work for an employer, it’s usually a pretty straightforward contract. You trade 40 or so hours of your week in exchange for a salary and some sprinkles. What happens during those hours is between you and your boss.

But when you cut the tethers of employment and became a free agent, what’s the agreement? Have you “signed on” for the promise of better work? More money? More freedom

I have always believed that success meant enjoying some level of flexibility in regards to money and schedule. But ? I’m beginning to wonder if that’s enough. Perhaps there’s something even more substantial available.

At the risk of irritating friends and colleagues who have already gotten an earful, I think Tim Ferriss makes some interesting points in his book The 4-Hour Workweek. In case you’ve missed the buzz, this book is a how-to guide for  free of FTE. Ferris has created an intoxicating argument for “lifestyle design,” which (paraphrased liberally) means making your money outside the confines of the 9 to 5 in order to live life more fully. In his case, it means running a lucrative online store (no problem, right?), outsourcing shipping, returns and customer service, and relying heavily on virtual assistants. All the while, he strongly advises nearly cutting off email and phone contact with those who would try to drag you back into the concerns of the workaday world.

Specifically, Ferriss disparages the idea of WfW, or Work for Work’s Sake. This is a trap I know well. For instance, when my partners and I launched our business, we immediately rented some stylish office space, without much examination of whether it was truly necessary. With that space came not only rent, expenses and a commute, but an expectation to show up, whether you had something to do or not. Ultimately, it was hard times and not a deliberate rejection of WfW that released us from that space.

Now, after nearly three years of working from home, I still have difficulty breaking free from the expectation of working what are essentially factory hours. If I’m not productive by 9 a.m., take too long of a lunch, or quit early, I feel pangs of guilt. But why? If you are your own boss, what does it matter what hours you work? If you can generate an income you’re happy with in 10 hours, why work 40? Imagine what you could do with the remaining time.

I think the key to breaking free is to begin thinking like a business owner, or as the phrase goes, working on the business, not in it. That can mean a number of things, depending on the nature of your business. In practical terms, it means getting others to do what you’ve been doing — bookkeeping, IT, marketing, sales, etc. — particularly if they can do it better, and maybe even if they can’t.

If you’re a consultant or creative, you’ll have a harder time breaking free than someone whose business creates products. You can be so successful in selling your time, that you have no hours left to develop other income streams, particularly passive income streams that, once set up, lessen your dependency on work for hire.

Moving from selling your time to selling more products or services is a shift that is advocated by Coudal Partners, 37 Signals and Segura, Inc., and dealt with at their periodic Seed Conference. To paraphrase Jim Coudal, if you’re someone who sells your time and creativity to your clients, you need to turn your powers on yourself with the goal of learning and expanding, but also possibly creating something that produces income and frees you from hourly wages.

Above all, the key to breaking free of WfW is viewing yourself not as an employee, whose contract with the business is to make himself available for 40 hours per week, but as the owner, who creates value and profit for the business in a manner that may have little correlation with time.

It’s amazing how we need others to give us permission to break with societal norms and do the unthinkable. I don’t mean unthinkable acts like marrying your first cousin. Unless you’re royalty, in which case, it’s probably ok. Rather, I’m referring to what passes for unthinkable among neurotic social climbers in New York.

I remember reading a few years ago in the food section of the NYT that it was once again OK to order pudding for dessert. I had no idea it had been verboten. But I can only imagine the shame that some New Yorkers must have felt for once having considered ordering a Crème Brûlée.

Today the Times brings yet more relief with a column giving us permission to drink our red wine chilled. Feeling guilty about the ice cube you slipped into your Cabernet last week? You are forgiven. Even better, you’re encouraged to chill boldly.

I like the columnist, Eric Asimov. He’s an entertaining writer and has broad tastes, occasionally reviewing non-wine beverages, such as Belgian trappist ales (yum) and American root beers. I think it says more about his audience that Asimov spends two-thirds of the column having to make the case for chilling reds, before he can get to the practical questions of which reds and how. Still, permission is permission. So before anyone changes their mind, I’m going to have me some rice pudding and a nice, iced Tempranillo this evening. Not together though. That would be verboten.

How serendipitous. A friend of mine sent an article that contained a link to the very story I had been wracking my brain to recall for some time.

It’s about a college student who drops out, but chooses to follow his whimsy and takes the odd class in calligraphy. He never finishes college. Years later, however, all that time spent learning about the intricacies of script and type pays off. The dropout helps create the world’s first typography friendly computer, the Macintosh. If you haven’t guessed, the dropout is Steve Jobs. He tells the rest of the story in his commencement speech at Stanford: “You’ve got to find what you love.”

It’s a post for another day, but I just love stories that demonstrate the importance of going with your gut and pursuing your interests, despite conventional wisdom. Heck, if I had followed the CW, I’d be a financial planner now. And I’ll bet somewhere out there a financial planner is wishing she’d pursued creative writing…

Meanwhile, Disney’s Club Penguin, only the first in a portfolio of virtual worlds for kids, now has seven times more traffic than Second Life. One analyst predicts that 20 million kids will be members of a virtual world by 2011, up from 8 million and change today.

So, I wonder when will the parental backlash will begin? In my household alone, I’m sure that my three Webkinz fanatics have amassed collections of animals ($10-12 each), charms ($3 each) and trading cards ($3 per pack) worth hundreds. I don’t think we could afford for the kids to join yet another virtual world without us being bankrupted in the real world.

Check out the article Web Playgrounds of the Very Young.

Hotel Room 1931, by Edward Hopper

NYTimes has a story about how hotels and airports have started to notice that their customers like to carry laptops and use the Internets when they travel. OMG, who knew?

It’s fun to snark at big companies for missing the obvious, but I don’t think this kind of blindness is unique to large organizations. We all have difficulties seeing ourselves (or our products, or our services, or our blog posts) the way other people see them. So, we don’t see the obvious flaws. Nor do we catch the obvious needs.

That’s why it’s critical to get outside our own preconceptions and misconceptions and see what reality looks like to our customers, clients and users.

I’m not necessarily suggesting focus groups or surveys. They have their uses, but depend on people’s proven inability to accurately and honestly report their recollections, opinions and intentions. Rather, I’m talking about observation: watching people use your product and behave in your environment.

Observation can take a number of forms. One is usability testing, in which you watch people try to use the thing you created and note where people encounter problems. Another is ethnographic observation, in which you watch people do what they do in their natural environment. For instance, if you make dishwashers, you might observe people washing their own dishes in their own homes.

It sounds so simple and so obvious. And it is. And that’s why it’s really worth doing. If you’re looking to find out what your customers need, don’t ask, but watch. It’s like that Henry Ford quote: “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”

Back to the NYT article, it seems that Marriott spent some time observing guests.

“When we tested our new bedding, we discovered people were taking the decorative pillows and they were using them to essentially nestle in and pull out their laptop. They were using the pillows to create a desk.”

A small observation, and probably just one of many, but tremendously valuable. People not only want to use their laptops, but they want to do so in bed (and while eating and drinking, I’ll bet). But there is no easy way to do so. Yet, if you were to survey or interview customers about what they want in a hotel room, you probably wouldn’t uncover this need to simultaneously compute and watch TV in bed. You’d have every reason to think that the typical hotel room bed-desk-TV arrangement is perfectly fine.

Read On the Job, Everywhere at nytimes.com