A social media strategy is almost a requirement at this point for any commercial brand. For most, the common combination of a Twitter and Facebook account fed with frequent posts is usually enough. With every tweet your followers are reminded of your existence, and if you are lucky enough, they may even click through to any links you provide. But harnessing the power of social media in a carefully orchestrated campaign utilizing all the major platforms? That’s an entirely different proposition – and quite a feat if it can be pulled off. Despite the challenge, that’s exactly what the creative team behind Old Spice did.

During the week of July 12th, the incredible creatives at Wieden+Kennedy managed to harness the freakishly strong power of social media to create one of the most memorable ad campaigns the Internet has seen yet. Over the course of two days, the team fielded questions from all over the Internet, and responded by writing and filming 87 short YouTube videos.

The right material for the job

If your target market intersects with the user base of your choice of social media platforms, there’s a direct connection to the walls and feeds of millions of potential customers that is just waiting to be made.

In case you are not already familiar with the Old Spice ads staring Isaiah Mustafa, they originally aired during the 2010 Super Bowl and later during the Winter Olympics. The first commercial shot with its mix of quick shots, random imagery and deadpan delivery proved to have the right recipe for viral Internet success resulting in over 16 million views on YouTube. By mid-July the “Old Spice guy” was already something of a household name in the dysfunctional households of various Internet communities. As a result,  when a call was put out on Old Spice’s Twitter and Facebook pages for people to ask the Old Spice guy questions (you could basically ask him anything) word spread pretty fast, resulting in lots of submissions, giving the writers plenty of source material to riff on. Once received, the questions were sorted through and ranked for effectiveness, and a script was quickly written and filmed, resulting in a short and usually very funny YouTube clip.

The plan comes together

People soon realized what was going on – that there was a direct line to the Old Spice guy and that he might say your name and do something really weird in a widely viewed, personalized video. From there things really got rolling. Soon, such celebrities as Alyssa Milano, Rose McGowan and George Stephanopoulos, bloggers, and other specialty websites (with decent-sized communities, of course, to keep the buzz going) like Perez Hilton, G4TV’s Kevin Pereira (embedded below), gadget blog Gizmodo and the Huffington Post started asking questions. The resulting video responses were linked on traffic driving sites such as Digg and Reddit. And having the Old Spice guy respond directly to a Reddit user and to Digg founder Kevin Rose didn’t hurt either in getting that to happen.

But the great thing was that the videos didn’t have to feature a celebrity to be funny. Seemingly random users provided material that was just as good. And, like anybody who takes a photo with a celebrity or gets an autograph, they want to share it with everybody. Famous or not, when people received personalized videos, they ran back to their community of choice and posted them, further spreading the word.

The payoff

So by targeting high profile Internet figures, individual websites and users known only deep within their respective communities, the Old Spice guy responded to the entire internet. And apparently the whole stunt has paid off. As noted in Adweek “According to Nielsen data provided by Old Spice, overall sales for Old Spice body-wash products are up 11 percent in the last 12 months; up 27 percent in the last six months; up 55 percent in the last three months; and in the last month, with two new TV spots and the online response videos, up a whopping 107 percent.”

Google CFO Patrick Pichette even weighed in on the campaign noting that “It just gives you a glimpse of where the world is going”. Well the world may be going in that direction but how long will it take until people learn to tune it out as they have banner ads and television commercials? Will people allow the occasional weaving of marketing with their entertainment, or will they smell a sales pitch a mile away? Too bad the Old Spice guy isn’t taking any more questions….

When I was a creative director at HomePC magazine back in the early ’90s, there were lots of articles making predictions about the convergence of PCs, TV, and telecom. Along came WebTV in ’96, a big box with a wired keyboard that made your TV into a monitor for accessing the Internet. Microsoft bought WebTV, but it never took off; it was very clumsy, with a bad browser among other shortcomings (not surprising). Now here we are in 2010, and you can plug your ethernet cable or wi-fi into your TV. Presto, you’re on the Web—sort of.

I don’t claim to be an expert on the television/Internet space, but I can assure you that something’s very wrong with this picture. I’ve been doing a little research and I’ve looked closely at Web-enabled Sony, LG, and Panasonic TVs. These sets do not offer the big, open Internet we know and love; instead, they provide widgets and content channels chosen for us based on licensing deals between TV manufacturers and content providers such as Google, Yahoo, Netflix, and Time Warner.

This may seem to be a huge improvement for consumers. We can get movies instantly from Netflix and YouTube and great content from some of the best media companies in the world. In return, the media companies expand their audience, which will help them weather the recession and diminish their advertising woes. This is great for Sony and Google. But it’s bad for us. As Dan Frommer from Business Insider puts it, “We want a TV with a real Web browser that offers full access to the entire Web via wi-fi/broadband—not some crippled gimmick.”

As a marketer and consumer I have serious concerns with the direction the new Web-enabled TV movement is taking. I’m reminded of the AOL days, with closed proprietary systems where content was pushed and interactivity was limited. The only true convergence happening here is the merging of services provided by ISPs, telecoms, and TV manufacturers.

My exploration into the world of Web-enabled TVs has renewed my appreciation for the current Web—the Web that is free, open, and innovative. We need to remind ourselves that we have a wonderful and fragile resource that needs to be fought for and defended. I hope we haven’t lost the battle when it comes to Web TV, and that it will evolve based on user demand and not on corporate enrichment. Content providers, telecoms, and manufacturers need to realize that with an open Web they’ll have their biggest audiences and happiest sponsors.

If you’re interested in the fight for the open Web and Internet neutrality, please visit these sites:

http://www.savetheinternet.com/

http://www.freepress.net/

http://www.wearetheweb.org/

http://www.openinternetcoalition.com/

http://stopbigmedia.com/

Earlier this month I attended the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) conference in New York. The mission of SoDA is to advance the profession of digital marketing through education, discussions of best practices, and advocacy. The conference was billed as an “un”conference, which made the event conversational, collaborative—and at times a little too “un”structured. Still, it was a good experience.

We broke up into groups to discuss hot topics: Challenges of the Modern Agency, Metrics for Success, Engaging Social Media. I had hoped to gain insight into how large companies and agencies are managing their brands within their social-media initiatives. It’s clear that social media should be part of a brand’s marketing strategy, but how are companies controlling their brands’ voices? To my surprise, other attendees from top agencies and brands had similar questions—but few answers.

Some sound ideas popped up, such as the development of branding guidelines for social media, and the hiring of brand editors who can provide a checkpoint before tweets, blogs, and comments are published. These two methods can work fine for blogs themselves, but they can kill the spontaneity and immediacy of a tweet or a comment on a blog. Moreover, what do you do if your entire company is enthusiastic about speaking out and joining in on all the conversations?

If it’s your company’s policy to allow many social-media voices, it’s imperative to set up rules and guidelines and hold your employees accountable. Amber Naslund of the blog Altitude provides great examples of blogging policies from large corporations that can be used as an excellent starting point for developing your company’s guidelines.

If your social-media voice is monitored by a specifically designated department or by an outside agency, it’s easier to stay in control and keep your brand’s message inline. Your social-media captains should plan how they will uphold your brand’s promise in their conversations with customers, employees, and partners. They should meet weekly or monthly with the marketing or brand teams to ensure that all efforts are aligned with your brand’s strategy and corporate culture.

For a Twitter campaign for one of our clients, we create a monthly bag of “evergreen” tweets that are mixed in with spontaneous ones. That client is accustomed to having its copy and creative approved by its legal department and brand managers, which is not an ideal situation for quick tweets about what’s going on at the moment. To overcome this we develop 20 tweets that can be preapproved, and then mix those in with 10 spontaneous tweets that follow our defined social-media strategy. With this method and ongoing monitoring we’re able to lower the risks of tainting the brand, while still appearing spontaneous and continuing to build one-to-one relationships with the company’s customers.

This is new territory, and the best tactics have yet to be determined.  We encourage you to share your experiences and thoughts on how you manage brand continuity in social media for your company and your clients.

Welcome to our venue for getting personal.  This is where we’ll share our know-how and stay in touch with our professional community. It’s also a platform for others to speak out on trends, best practices and their own insights. It’s a space to open up about our experience and our experiences, and process our processes…and I’ll start off with our thinking about this very blog.

So how do we –or you– know if it’s right to launch a blog? Or the right time? When it seems like everyone’s already blogging, why should anyone start something new?

In our case, we’ve been recommending blogs and social media for clients for sometime now, as part of a robust integrated marketing strategy including other initiatives like email campaigns, search marketing, PR, speaking at conferences, etc. We set our own marketing priorities just as we would advise our clients. First we redesigned our website so that it effectively presents our experience, services and brand personality, and rigged it so it brings in leads and subscribers to our newsletter. Second, we swore to doing our monthly newsletter, Loewy’s Latest, with no excuses, once a month. Now is the blog, and next up is our Facebook Page, Twitter…all the social media we provide the strategy, design and technology for to our clients.

Basically, before starting to roll out social media for our own company, we spent time generating a sort of critical mass through other outlets: optimizing our website to build more traffic, creating a larger pool of contacts through our email newsletter. Now that we’ve achieved that critical mass, it’s time for us to take it further – expand our network and allow the conversations to become less one-way.

A blog is an appropriate choice for us because it’s a good fit with our brand: conversational, friendly, smart, and collaborative.  It’s also a good fit with our goals. We have a lot of experience to communicate but we’re also are always looking for ways to improve and stay on top of emerging trends. Our blog will let us do both.

So how’s your website doing? Does your online identity fit your branding strategy? Does your website’s overall experience match the quality of your products and services?  Are you getting leads, selling products, building awareness or even getting traffic?  If the answer is yes, then maybe you’re ready to do a blog – because you have an audience, a tone of voice and a network. You’re ready to be a thought leader in your industry or at least have an opinion. Of course you can have a blog without a corporate website, and you can even make money at it.   But if you’re like us, and most of our clients and peers, your website is critical for doing business online, disseminating information, and creating the first point of contact for all potential customers.

Let’s say you’ve got it all together and you’re ready get started.  Keep your blog focused, stay in tune with what you know and be relevant to your game.  Yes, there are many blogs in your industry, but any niche or network can use fresh thinking, so don’t be apprehensive. Like any tool, if it is available and right for you, then use it.  Make sure it doesn’t duplicate what your site is already doing for you and your audience – consider it an avenue for a different kind of messaging and communication.

For us, we understand that our audience is an intimate group of professionals looking to share best practices for doing business online. In upcoming posts we’ll be engaging our network and sharing our points of view on what we do best: providing the strategy, design and technology to companies that value the power of the internet. We’re kicking off the dialogue with several topics each month, coming from senior Loewy staffers with different areas of expertise.

Here’s to getting social. We’ve opened the floor, now we invite you to join the conversation…and if commenting is not your thing, just stop by and say Helloewy.