You may have heard of a certain trending topic earlier this month about a mom who posted a video claiming there were shards of glass in her Huggies brand baby wipes. Yikes! Something like that should be off the shelves immediately, right?! How is her baby? Did the wipes injure him or her?
I’m sure these questions, along with others, were on the minds of all moms who use the Hugggies brand. So what happens when something like this goes viral? Huggies social media platforms take a beating. Let me be the first to tell you how grateful I am that I do not work for the Huggies Marketing team. That must have been a rough couple of days, and it’s just the beginning! I’m sure they had to go through a lengthy and exhausting process to even find out how (if) this happened! They know their ingredients do not include glass or come in contact with anything like glass, but something could be going wrong at their factories, right? So far, it seems that they have a good crew working around the clock to answer questions, give refunds and refer customers to the right department. One post on their Facebook was released on August 21st, and has over 8,000 shares, 4,000 likes and 6,000 comments (each of which looks like it has a response from a Huggies team member). Comments range from, “I just saw the shards of glass in my package too, what are you going to do, Huggies?” to “No wonder my kid has a rash,” to the naysayers stating, “All of you are really just asking for a handout, #itsnotglass.”
So who do you believe? The naysayers who are fed up with people “asking for a handout” or the moms who are honestly concerned and vowing to “never buy Huggies again?”
As a social media community specialist, I’ll tell you right now I see ALL kinds of comments on my client’s posts. It’s not easy to differentiate between the spammer, a legit angry customer, and the person who is never happy about ANYTHING. What I can tell you is that a little research will go a long way. Sure the Huggies video went viral (a whopping 7,517,090 Views), but how will you know what’s true unless you find out yourself? Go to your local grocery store, spend the $6 and look at the wipes. Look at all sides of the conflict, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Look at your ingredient list; are you or your little ones allergic to anything? School just started, so go into your kid’s chemistry class and ask the teacher for his theory on the subject. Seriously, they might have some insight! Until Huggies shares that they are officially recalling the product, all you can do is find out more information on your own.
Social media is a great tool, but when it gets attacked like this, with a different story in every comment, it’s pretty much the last place you want to look for truth.
So whose side are you on? Share in the comments below!
This post was written by Ginger Marks. Ginger is a Social Media Specialist Lead with Media Connect Partners.
