Has there ever been a more dramatic example of the right and wrong of how to do social media campaigns than what we’ve seen in the last week?
Two campaigns, one great, one not so much
First we had Fast Company’s “Influence Project”, which has been nearly unanimously panned as exactly the wrong way to “measure influence”, which was of course, the entire aim of the campaign.
Then yesterday, we broke open the story about a social media campaign that will very likely go down as one of the best ever (results directly from the agency behind the campaign below)- the shirtless Old Spice guy responding hilariously to just about anybody through a personalized video. Both very well known brands; one doing social media oh so wrong, the other oh so right.
We’re not going to focus on the negative here (i.e. The Influence Project), first of all, because a number of high quality articles have already been written about it, and second, because negative is boring. To make a long story short, it was done nearly entirely wrong, and it completely backfired into a very negative meme for Fast Company. If you’d like to disagree with this, please let us know in the comments and we can have a debate.
So let’s talk about this amazing Old Spice campaign.
Old Spice TV campaign set the stage
Old Spice has been of course running its very popular television commercials with the new Shirtless Old Spice Guy for a few months now, and had been doing their marketing due diligence of putting up the commercials on YouTube and running a Twitter account and Facebook Page. Many people (including a few celebrities) tweeted out and/or left comments on sites like Reddit about their appreciation for the commercials. Nothing groundbreaking there. Then came yesterday.
What no one outside of the team running the social media campaign knew, was that they had been collecting people’s – and especially celebrities’ – questions and responses across a wide range of social media sites, including Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, even Yahoo Answers, and were preparing for yesterday’s all-day-video-shoot where Shirtless Old Spice Guy would answer these and new incoming comments. It was such a simple idea that we imagine PR and marketing folks around the world slapping themselves on the forehead thinking, “It’s so simple! Why didn’t I think of that?!”
If you still haven’t watched the videos at this point, stop reading and at the very least go and watch our list of the best celebrity videos. There are many more too on Old Spice’s YouTube channel. When you’ve stopped laughing, please continue reading this post.
How this was SO right
So what made this (ongoing we hope) campaign so successful yesterday? Here’s a quick list:
- The campaign GAVE something great to people and didn’t ask anything in return. This was the most important aspect of the campaign, and really the exact opposite of what the Influence Project did.
- Old Spice got an attractive actor to talk into the camera all day without his shirt on. This certainly helped.
- They responded to a few celebrities, and then other celebrities starting lining up to get in on the act, and each of them told their millions of Twitter followers all about it. Brilliant.
- Nearly every video was drop-dead funny – and under a minute in length, which was also key.
- They obviously did their homework before launching this campaign, as evidenced by the celebrity tweets they referenced, so of which were two weeks old.
- They let it grow organically – there were no press releases or conferences. Just good old fashioned word of mouth.
Not enough proof for you? Well…
The results speak for themselves.
We have been in touch with Wieden+Kennedy the PR firm that put together this campaign (we’d say Wieden+Kennedy will most likely win all kinds of awards for this) for some impressive results from the first day of the campaign:
- Top of Digg
- Top of Reddit
- Trending topic on Twitter
- Inventor of Twitter tweets it
- Marriage proposal carried out, AND ACCEPTED
- @Alyssa_Milano’s home address acquired
- Coverage in mainstream news / tech news / industry news (we’re now in the Times of India, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Guardian and Metro in the UK).
- Twitter followers multiplied by 10
So there you have it, one campaign that asked for a lot and didn’t really offer anything in return, and one that gave a lot and didn’t really ask for anything in return. Is it really any surprise which one was panned and which one was praised?
I quite agree. Old Spice’s highly successful campaign is something big companies must keep in mind the next time they run a campaign themselves.
I didn’t get a reply from him though :*(
oh, that’s sad ;-)
Old Spice Follower Count was about 3,000 and now has jumped to 36,872 over the past 2 days. (25,595 today + 7,857 today and counting!) according to our stats at fan Page List:
http://fanpagelist.com/user/oldspice
Yep, account was at about 3500 followers when we picked up the story.
They took their time to provide a good execution for a good idea… results speaks for itself. After a few more of these and I wonder if they’ll act on their popularity abroad and start exporting. I’d certainly buy it if I see it on the shelves in Europe!
Their Facebook is up to around 580,000. I wonder what it was before this.
Tommy Means here from Mekanism. Your POV on The Influence project seems a bit one sided. A few points:
1. “Nearly universally panned” is not factually accurate. How are you measuring? In any case, nobody is perfect but this is certainly one way to do it: Online Reach + Persuasion. It’s not science and certainly subjective. If you have a better idea how to measure then we want to hear from you.
2. “Completely Backfired” is also inaccurate. Polarizing? Yes. We are tracking 60/40 positive/negative. Fast Company is a brand that disrupts business as usual to illicit debate. And that is precisely what this project is doing amongst the most influential people on the Internet. The client is extremely happy with the results.
3. Yes the Old Spice campaign is genius (I measure genius by how jealous somebody’s work makes me). But it is not exactly “organic.” Old Spice spent millions in production and broadcast media buying to develop and establish this character to a mass audience. We did the Influencer Project with zero budget and our numbers are through the ceiling. We’ll release numbers as we go.
4. “So there you have it, one campaign that asked for a lot and didn’t really offer anything in return, and one that gave a lot and didn’t really ask for anything in return. Is it really any surprise which one was panned and which one was praised?”
This is also inaccurate. We offered people a utility to measure their own influence. We have almost 1/2 million uniques and 1,000 people per day are doing it without any paid media behind the project.
Also Mark Borden, Fast Company’s reporter has been interviewing influencers on a daily basis such as Guy Kawaski to give more insight into the more meta aspects of influence, it’s impact on social media, marketing, and the human psychology that drives it.
So while the Old Spice campaign gives us a way to smile about deodorant, The Influence Project, with all of it’s awesomeness and flaws, gives us a relevant and deep insight into social media’s impact on influence.
If you still think it’s a failure that’s cool too and you are entitled to your perspective. I just wanted to make sure you had a few facts.
cheers.
Hi Tommy, thanks for your detailed response – as I said in the post we welcome a debate on this. I’ll try to answer precisely:
1. I measured this by the social media influencers that I follow. They almost universally panned it. Also, a number of blog posts by prominent writers panned it. That’s how I judged it.
2. It most certainly backfired. Fast Company is your client so I’m not going to comment on whether they are happy or not – however, I’m pretty sure they were not expecting this much backlash before they launched the campaign. That’s why it backfired. As far as the 60/40 approval thing goes…we’ll be happy to show results of any surveys you’ve taken.
3. Here we obviously agree, and again we’ll certainly look at your numbers when they come out.
4. I just completely disagree with you here – for the vast majority of the people that took part in the Influence Project, all it did was waste the time of the people they shared it with – the only ones that are going to get anything out of this are the ones that end up in Fast Company (either the website or the print mag). As far as going around and interviewing people, that’s great, but I personally don’t put the two together: one is a viral campaign, the other is interviewing experts.
Thanks again for your comments and I hope this clarifies my thinking some. Social media done right is a tricky business, and sometime things work out, and sometimes they don’t, and hopefully we’ve all learned a number of lessons from the last week, both great and not so great.
Right on Chad.
Just a final clarification on point #4. The project and Mark Bordon’s interviews are linked via Fast Company’s blog, Twitter #tag & Facebook feeds. Here is a link to his interview with Guy Kawasaki.
http://bit.ly/cN9Go5
The interview is an insightful commentary on the Influence Project, why he is participating, and why it’s important.
Guy’s view on the project’s polarizing aspect:
“There’s a theory that if five people are pissed off at you enough to tweet about it, there are really 50 people pissed off at you because only one out of 10 bother to write. I understand that theory. My theory is there are also tens of thousands who are happy and you can’t make every person happy.”
Ok. That’s all. Thanks again for the dialogue.
cheers.
Tommy
Thank you too for replying Tommy, and we certainly appreciate your feedback as well. I’m really believe that the last week is a huge learning experience for every marketer working with social media, and I wish you the best with the rest of the project.
What other custom video response projects similar to this have been done before this project debuted that may or may not have influenced this work? Hotmail’s The New Busy site has a module where a dad (played by TBTL’s Luke Burbank) will “custom” make a pancake in the shape of any animal the user requests, and throw a funny quip in along with it. It’s pretty good, and I thought worth noting.
That Influencer Project was just spam in sheep’s clothing. IMO. I took one look and bailed and hoped I wouldn’t get too many people inviting me to join.
i looking for your country man email so cao i