If you’re one of those who believes that “any publicity is good publicity,” or that getting potential customers “engaged” with your product includes pissing them off, then the Motrin campaign probably seems like a great success. And I’m sure there are those who will argue that the critical Motrin moms are a vocal minority, that they are too easily offended by something that was meant to be humorous, etc. That may even be true. But it’s still a problem for the company — a very modern problem. For better or worse, this kind of social-media “flash flood” of negative PR involving Twitter, blogs and Facebook is becoming more and more commonplace.

It will be interesting to see how Motrin responds. Will they take the same road as GM did when everyone used the footage they provided to generate negative commercials for the Chevy Tahoe? Or will try their best to they ignore it? If they’re smart, they’ll run a bunch of the Twitter comments, video responses and blog posts on the Motrin site. Dave Knox, a digital brand manager for Procter & Gamble, says Motrin has a problem on its hands (link via Cyndy Aleo-Carreira at The Industry Standard). Shannon McKarney has some good perspective on the whole kerfuffle here.

Brea has a great website and blog, and she is also active on Twitter. She’s not the only actor from Heroes to start Twittering, either — Greg Grunberg, who plays the mind-reader Matt Parkman on the show, also has an account (where he spends a lot of time talking about his all-star band, the Band From TV, which includes Grunberg on drums, Teri Hatcher from Desperate Housewives on vocals and child star Brad Savage on bass). Brea has also been giving interviews to more than just the usual Entertainment Tonight type of outlets, including one with social-media guru Chris Brogan, in which she talks about the difficulties of being a public figure online, and even one with a home-made TV show called Bradman TV.

For her latest trick, Brea is setting up an online “Twitterview,” in which she has asked people to send her questions by posting them on Twitter and tagging them #bglive, or by showing up on Twitter at 7 p.m. (PST) on November 18, when she will also be broadcasting the whole thing on Ustream. I think this is smart — instead of having to sit for a traditional interview with dumb questions dreamed up by some producer, she gets to “crowd-source” her questions and answer them in real-time.

Update:

I should have mentioned that actress/writer/producer Felicia Day is also a social-media ninja. The star of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Joss Whedon’s online musical comedy Dr. Horrible — as well as her own show The Guild — is active on Twitter and on her blog, and (geek bonus points) is also an avid gamer. Got any other candidates? Feel free to drop them in the comments.

“Blogging is free. It doesn’t matter if anyone reads it. What matters is the humility that comes from writing it. What matters is the meta-cognition of thinking about what you’re going to say. How do you explain yourself, to your few employees, or to your cat, or to whoever’s going to look at it? How do you force yourself to describe, in three paragraphs, why you did something? How do you respond, out loud?

If you’re good at it, then people are going to read it. If you’re not good at it and you stick with it, you’ll get good at it. This has become much bigger than “are you BoingBoing” or “are you the Huffington Post” — this has become such a micro-publishing platform that basically you’re doing it for yourself, to force yourself to become part of the conversation, even if it’s just that big (holds two fingers about an inch apart). And that changes an enormous amount.”

Followed by Peters, who said:

“My first post was in August of 2004. No single thing in the last 15 years professionally has been more important to my life than blogging. It has changed my life, it has changed my perspective, it has changed my intellectual outlook, it’s changed my emotional outlook, and it’s the best damn marketing tool by an order of magnitude I’ve ever had. And it’s free.”

The clip itself is here and there are more clips from their talk here.

“Books are souvenirs that hold ideas. Ideas are free. If no one knows about your idea, you fail. If your idea doesn’t spread, you fail. If your idea spreads but no one wants to own the souvenir edition, you fail.”

If I were a publisher, or an author’s agent, or teaching a class on writing, I would engrave that somewhere very prominent.

This is a slick little app, even if it could have used some other features, as TechPresident notes (more GPS integration would have been cool, for example). At the same time, however, it’s even more impressive that this app was put together not by a company hired by the Obama campaign, but by a handful of passionate supporters who put their own time and resources into doing it. The campaign was then smart enough to recognize it as being a great opportunity, and gave it the official blessing. Smart.