New Lessons from Old Spice

By now, I’m sure you’ve all at least heard of the Old Spice Guy campaign and the immense waves it made this week. It is one for the textbooks – a case study that will be reviewed, recounted and revisited for at least the next year, I’m sure. And with good reason. On every level, it was exemplary of what a digital campaign should be.

It answered all the social media ‘rules’:

1. Be engaging
2. Be integrated
3. Be human
4. Be transparent
5. Influence the influencers

The campaign, which began with a string of hilarious print and TV ads, moved into digital using YouTube to broadcast personalised video responses to people talking about or to Old Spice across social networks (primarily Twitter, Facebook and YouTube but also across forums like Reddit and Yahoo! Answers). With YouTube as it’s very well-branded ‘homebase’, the campaign took the brand into other spaces with similar, but space-specific, creative treatments, behaviours and tone of voice.

The responses were instantly popular. Hilarious and off-beat, they very rarely spoke about the actual brand or product (unless, somehow, smacking a pinata with a dead fish is somewhere in the Old Spice brand guidelines). The brand became human. It wasn’t Old Spice the brand, it was the Old Spice Guy with (funny) stories. And it was responding personally to us, the users, the ‘dearest and closest internet friends’.

While the Old Spice Man created videos for the ‘average joe’ (and did he ever - he actually even proposed for someone), he also responded to users with high levels of activity, followers and authority (such as Digg founder Kevin Rose and celebritweeters like Alyssa Milano, Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres) which helped the campaign grow exponentially. It brought the level to an accessible user level and found celebrity involvement without the celebrity fee.

Old Spice started by sponsoring a tweet to solidify their space in Twitter’s Top Trends and the campaign was trending across Twitter and the web within hours of the initial tweet (something that would have happened organically, without the sponsored tweet – but still a safe move on Old Spice’s part).

Throughout the campaign, the agency behind it all – Wieden + Kennedy – brilliantly kept an open-door policy about the whole thing, offering up behind-the-scene shots and tell-all explanations of how the process was working.

The campaign is a simple idea, executed well. It hasn’t reinvented the wheel, but it has defined the way we use it.

What’s the big takeaway that B2B marketers can take from this? That thisn't just a B2C case study - it is a case study for B2B, too.

Before this, Old Spice was not an exciting brand. For as long as I have known it, it has been ‘the stuff my dad wears’ (and my Dad really does wear it which he will now claim makes him a trendsetter).

Campaigns like this are what give brands new traction. B2B has long had the reputation of being less fun and creative than the consumer side of our industry. We know that’s not true, so let’s get out the dead fish and started beating the piñata with it!

Smash Summit Attracts the Best Marketers & Brands in Silicon Valley

Smash Summit, which was held in San Francisco yesterday, explored social media marketing strategies, tactics, tools, & campaigns used by successful online companies to acquire and retain customers on search, social, and mobile.

Some of the speakers included Altimeter Group's Jeremiah Owyang, Google's Hunter Walk, Twitter's Anamitra Banerji, Facebook's Bubba Murarka, Mattel's Cynthia Neiman, Dogster's Ted Rheingold, RockYou's Lisa Marino and Paul Kim from Automattic.

Also on stage was Marcus Nelson from Salesforce, Comcast's Frank Eliason, David Lifson from Postling, Rowen Payson from Virgin America, Rashmi Sinha from Slideshare and Victoria Ransom from Wildfire.

Payvment's Christian Taylor talked about the use of shopping carts to enhance your campaigns; one simple line of code embedded on your web page transforms into a shopping cart system without a lot of effort. You can use it to sell your products anywhere or with affiliate/referral links to increase your affiliate revenue.

It's important to create social sharing components in your copy: the more social your copy is, the more effective your click through rates will be. He used an example of how KISS in the 1970s made their fans become part of their army. The same thing applies today but online -- create your army and keep them satisfied.

A few Facebook fan page tips for big brands: give users an incentive to become a fan of your brand by offering exclusive deals or merchandise. This can triple engagement as well as up the number of fans. For example, Pampers offered 1,000 diaper packs for $10 each on its Facebook store and in one hour, they not only sold all 1,000 diapers, but got 1,000 more fans.

20,000 brands & retailers have launched stores on Facebook, 120,000 searchable products have been added to Facebook, and there are 400,000 Facebook users shopping across these 20,000 stores.

Google's Hunter Walk talked about how to more effectively broadcast your business on YouTube and how it should be part of your overall SEO strategy.

Rule #1: create the right content and make sure it’s the most effective it can be in the YouTube environment. He reminds us that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world with over 1 billion video playbacks each day.

So, what is a content strategy? Creating something people want to watch AND helping others create content for you.

Sure, you have to create something that is not only compelling in a YouTube environment, but also authentic, the overused but still relevant word when 'playing' on social media platforms. Being authentic is not enough however.

The basics: create a YouTube channel, upload demos, make sure you offer lots of content so there are more opportunities to engage with people and offer value through fresh content. Other tips include showing some behind the scenes visuals and audio, such as interviews and amusing moments.

A few takeaways -- ask yourself the following questions:

How does your product relate to what people are talking about & searching about now?

Are you adding the most relevant meta data - description and tags?

Once you upload your video, are you participating in your community?

There is higher value in the comments people leave behind - you want to make sure you are participating in those discussions. You should have an anchor video (for your anchor, you should shoot for 5K+ views, which will help you surface in search and related videos and ultimately lead to more organic traffic.

You should also cross-promote your videos on Facebook, Twitter, your website and blog. You can auto-share your uploads, favorites and other links directly to other social networking sites. According to Hunter, for every auto-shared tweet, they see about 7 click backs on YouTube. You can also promote your video by getting a custom overlay which will improve your conversation funnel. You can then check your cost-per-view in your content and maximize/tweak it to get more click throughs over time.

Salesforce has a YouTube presence and with over 300 videos and more than 6,000 views a day, that's roughly the equivalent of 35 hyper-efficient sales reps on the phone.

Twilio's Jeff Lawson talks about how their solution is the intersection of communications apps and web developers. They have over 10,000 developers and are currently being used by Sony, 37 Signals, Tumblr, SalesForce, Duke and more.

With Twilio, you can call people from Twitter. We see a demo of Lawson calling Dave McClure who has opted into the system, directly from Dave's Twitter account.

Twilio allows you to use social media to connect to people you already know. He then shows the Zappos Twitter page and talks about how Zappos could have analytics around the content is reading when the person calls, i.e., Customer X was reading this particular tweet when he called Zappos. It's an interesting way to connect social media with voice and SMS.

Interacting with Television in Real Time

In the interacting with television in real time session at 140 Character Conference, Steve Garfield (@stevegarfield) chats with CBS Backstage LIVE Producer Rick Borutta (@CBSborutta) and NBC's Gavin Purcell (@gavinpurcell).

Making Online Video Viral at #SXSW

Key tips from today's SXSW panel on making online video viral.

1. Surprise and add elements of the unexpected, i.e., granny beating up a robber, Cookie Monster eating or saying something unusual, different colors, sounds, tempos.

2. Remember that it's all about building an audience, not just uploading content. Building a subscriber base is key - the community aspect is more important than most people think or pay attention to. Encourage people to create new content around your content - it gets viewers excited and allows them to participate.

3. Embed, embed, embed. If people can't easily embed your video across multiple platforms, it's going to be that much harder to spread virally. People want to be able to grab a video and point to it right away, whether that's a URL link OR an easy embed into their blog or other sites. Make it easy for people to capture it and distribution.

4. Metadata - make sure you create good titles and relevant tagging. Don't try to game the system or trick people by false tagging - it only pisses people off. Use unique titles and tailor your titles for your audience. In other words, you could have the same video on Vimeo as you do on YouTube or a blog, but you may choose to create different titles for each of them because your audience may differ in each place.

5. Distribute in multiple formats and be platform agnostic.

One other thing to note was on curation. Sure, you can create great content and have the best tagging and titles in your category, but another effective way to build an audience is to be a great curator of other people's content. There is increasingly so much content in so many categories on the web. Why not provide a great service by making it easier for your audience to find what is most relevant and interesting to them?

Below is the panel playing with the audience at the end of the session. For giggles:

The Economics of Online Video

Below is a white paper on the economics of online video:

Summit on Climate & Faith Change Brings Global Leaders Together

Earlier this month, Faith leaders from around the world took part in a Summit without leaving their borders through use of client Zorap’s digital-rich collaborative technology.

One month after the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Summit leaders logged in from London, Washington, Nairobi, Jerusalem, Geneva and the Pacific Island of Palau, using Zorap, to discuss important issues around climate and faith.

Bishops and other faith leaders around the world encouraged people around the world to use Zorap to interact, discuss and collaborate on the topic of climate and faith change, rather than having to get on a plane to fly to London for the event. Zorap enabled countless more important leaders to join in a global discuss in real-time that couldn’t have happened otherwise.

Faith Climate Connect housed the various pieces of technology that were used during the event, including Zorap. Using tools like Zorap to engage on important topic matters such as the climate and faith, encourages leaders and the public to embrace technology to assist in decreasing their environmental impact, such as using virtual video conferences and media-rich chat instead of flying to events to meet with each other.

A facilitated video conference using Zorap was used for an interactive conversation between six significant leaders of the three different Abrahamic faiths located in different countries around the world.

The goal was to learn about, discuss and share their ideas about faith and information contained in the scriptures regarding caring for the environment. The Zorap conversation was projected onto a large screen for the audience in London and was live broadcasted through the Faith Climate Connect website for people to watch around the world.

There was also a question and answer session involving the audience posing questions to the faith leaders around the world. Each of these different elements highlighted how technology, particularly Zorap, can bridge geographical divides, bringing people together to learn from each other and decreasing their carbon footprint.

The Summit is the brainchild of the Bible Society, whose hope is to raise public awareness about the Biblical references and support for caring for the environment.

Zorap on Graveline America

Client Barry Spencer, CEO of Zorap talking to Dave Graveline at CES earlier this month.

Unveiled at CES, Zorap Clubs Increase Traffic & Fan Engagement on the Web

Incorporating all forms of digital-rich media to extend customer and fan engagement on the web, brands can now more effectively engage, communicate and collaborate with photos, videos, music, files, chat and more, using Zorap Clubs, unveiled by client Zorap today at CES.

Zorap Clubs are a group of custom chat rooms that are dynamically created and accessed by users through third-party websites.

Custom clubs are personalized with a brand’s look-and-feel and cancan be used to not only increase traffic and amplify fan and customer engagement on the web, but can offer audiences a streamlined, one-stop environment to interact with and around a brand’s message, services and their content offerings.

Whether it’s a new product announcement, an event, or a concert, Zorap allows you to put audio and video promotional content on stage in front of your audience in an exciting new way, so viewers can participate and engage with you in real-time from anywhere in the world.

Zorap Clubs enable social interaction and full audience participation around targeted content, while also allowing providing users with the opportunity to drag & drop their own personal media files into rooms, which ensures a more personal experience for them.

Individuals can also use Zorap by going to www.zorap.com. They can create and customize their own rooms, inviting friends and family to share rich multimedia content in real-time. An example of what a room looks like with shared content below:

They also support social media. Integration with Facebook Connect ensures timely and unique engagement experiences for Fans and Fan pages. Fans can invite friends from their social networks, make new friends, and remain active members of your community after their experience.

For bloggers and press in Vegas for CES, the Zorap team will be demoing Zorap Clubs and more at the Zorap booth at the ShowStoppers Media Event, on January 7, 2010 in the Lafite Ballroom at the Wynn Las Vegas, from 6 pm to 10 pm PST.

Loic LeMeur Interviews YouTube's Chad Hurley #leweb #tg09

Loic LeMeur interviews YouTube's Chad Hurley on LeWeb stage in Paris this morning.

Zorap Creates Traveling Geeks Virtual Geek Pad for France Blogging Tour

Zorap, which creates digital-rich media collaboration and group video communication experience experiences on the web, has created a Virtual Geek Pad for the Traveling Geeks team in France this week for LeWeb.

It is the only technology that lets you view and listen to music, video and photos with groups of up to 50 people anywhere in the world, using real-time audio and video communications.

While other real-time web communications tools like Twitter and Facebook provide value for active web users interested in quick soundbites, Zorap is the only service available that allows engagement using all forms of media in real-time, not just text, links and photos.

Check out the Virtual Geek Pad they designed for the Traveling Geeks.

Zorap allows individuals and groups of individuals to travel to movie sites and watch trailers together, listen to new music with their friends, sports events with their buddies, see wedding photos where everyone is viewing and sharing in real-time, shop for travel destinations with classmates or family, participate in a lively auction where you can see other bidders in real-time and more.