Our special edition Overflow Podcast called In the Red Zone with Frank Singleton, addresses the storm that appeared this week after an online entrepreneur named Matt Bacak distributed a press release proclaiming his “elite status” among the twitterverse.

Our concern is not whether his claims are right or wrong, whether his business claims are accurate etc… Our concern comes from the point of view of a Crisis Communications standpoint. How should he respond now that he has reputation has been challenged and negative criticisms have appeared in numerous blog posts? How will he repair the situation now that any new client will come across this fire that flamed up online?

Frank makes the distinction between reputation management and character management. Reputation management is what you “hope” people believe about you and character management is what you “are” … Matt is going to have to deal with repairing the character element.  By being somewhat contrite and stating the case that he took his action without understanding the full ramifications .. and letting it die down, he can then get to work on building back his reputation.

In the end, he wants to be relevant, so he needs to start acquiring testimonials identifying specific claims as accurate. Although there will be positive and negative response to these claims due to his reputation situation at the moment, Frank coins the term O+ Communications as what he is striving for .. more positive than negative responses.

As Frank says, “A good apology can keep you in the White House, ask Bill Clinton”

Most importantly, Matt should start to develop a dialogue, getting feedback by personally asking for advice from other online sources. This will turn the one way communications of a PR Web blast and a simple apology into the basis of Social Media communications which contains two-way input.

In the end he shouldn’t pout about the situation, just take solid efforts to engage the online community to help him eliminate his mistakes in the future.

In the Red Zone with Frank SIngleton is our specialty podcast that addresses Crisis Communications from the perspective of a Senior Vice President at Ogilvy Communications World Wide.

We felt it appropriate to christen this series with a situation that is a very hot topic at the moment, which is the campaign that was launched by McNeil Consumer Health, the parent company of the Motrin pain relief medicine.

We are not here to rehash the entire episode from the initial launch of the campaign to the bloggers who posted, and initiated a Twitter campaign that expanded exponentially until main stream media picked up on the firestorm, which ultimately generated an apology from Kathy Widmer, Vice President of Marketing for McNeil.

As well as an apology on the Motrin.com web site:

This is all background information for the conversation that we had with Frank in which he provides insight into the episode from a Crisis Communications Strategist’s perspective.

Key elements of our conversation include:

• Motrin was not prepared at the launch of the campaign to monitor the conversation that was taking place regarding their brand, which was particularly egregious as they launched the campaign over the weekend and the delay in response only fed into the volume of negative reaction.  The company could have very easily set up a search group in a Twitter app such as Tweetdeck to see any tweets about their brand, and could have Google Alerts monitoring news and blog posts about them.

• A more “human” response should be implemented immediately from the company via setting up a twitter account and preparing a video response to address the situation.  The corporate apology is not sufficient enough to quiet the controversy.

• Engage the more vocal bloggers to present the approach that they were trying to take with the campaign and solicit feedback.

• It appears that the campaign was a quick turnaround tactical approach to reaching a particular demographic, and the typical time and focus group research conducted on major campaigns was lacking.  The agency was probably

• McNeil now has the opportunity since they have the attention, to become conversational with real human communication detailing their true intentions, and become a good case study for how to respond to crisis situations correctly. There is a learning curve, and they probably won’t make this mistake again.

Let’s hope that the Motrin experience can be used as a bellwether for brands awareness and understanding of the impact of social media, and can be looked back upon as an episode that instigated an acceptance of progressive marketing strategies that incorporate listening and communicating tools.

What do you think? What are your reactions to the whole episode from a Social media standpoint?