How a Good Social Media Execution is your Best PR

Old Spice, new media.

You'd have to live in your own personal social media bubble to not have heard about or seen the Old Spice campaign executed by Wieden+Kennedy this past week. It was definitely the case of videos going viral. When it's all said and done, to be a marketing success, it will have had to achieve a specific, measurable goal beyond impressions.

Rob Gonda has pulled together some of the statistics on the YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter accounts that made up the campaign. As Scott Monty describes in his post linked above (emphasis mine),

the marketers targeted a handful of influencers to kick off the process - Kevin Rose (founder of Digg), Ellen Degeneres, Ashton Kutcher, The Huffington Post and others. Questions were requested and collected on a number of platforms: Twitter, the Old Spice Facebook page, YouTube, Reddit, 4Chan, blogs and Yahoo, to name a few. And then, during the course of the day, the questions were answered in near-real time via custom-made YouTube videos.

Think about it. They took the concept of the pitch and turned it on its head.

Instead of telling a wide group of influentials a bunch of things about the product via a press release, or even a custom pitch via email -- which would have essentially been indistinguishable from all the others they normally get -- W+K created a meme.

By approaching influencers in public with an unusual request, and then responding in real time on the same or main platforms with the results of that exchange, they started engaging the rest of the marketers and pundits in those networks.

The good social media execution attracted the attention of many bloggers -- I'm writing about it now, and so have dozens of others who may not normally write up product pitches, including some publication that get up there in readership like Mashable and TechCrunch. 

Mainstream media followed with the Toronto Star writing about the campaign, how both the writing and acting in real time have been the keys to achieving 16.3MM views as of Friday afternoon (Visible Measures). The good social media execution did some heavy lifting in the PR department.

See how the videos were made.

Will the meme live beyond social media to grace supermarket isles? We're left with a "silverfish hand catch" to figure it out.

[actor Isaiah Mustafa in one of the YouTube video responses]

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Comments

[Adam Singer]

And notice how they actually put budget behind the campaign? So many brands try to *go cheap* with social media marketing/PR. Old Spice actually invested some budget here (plus creativity) and look where it got them.

[Valeria Maltoni]

Budgets to do proper strategy scope and execution are key, I agree. What happens in many efforts is that they're copying the tactics and the results are just not there because companies have no idea of what the strategy was. Plus, it seems easy to do as you see all those personal accounts do well, until you try and do it for a business and it tanks.

[Richard A. Lewis]

It was a well executed social media campaign. Although I think it would have been more effective for a brand that wasn't as known as Old Spice. I am pretty sure most people know what "Old Spice" is. If say a new product had this kind of buzz surrounding it, I am sure that would have led to a greater increase in sales (which is any goal of advertising). I'd be interested to see if people decided to switch to Old Spice due to this campaign.

[JustinAtSmile.ly]

While enlisting key influencers is important, I think the smartest thing they did was foster a 2-way conversation between the company and their customers. Social media enables dialogue and Old Spice took advantage...

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Richard - "Although I think it would have been more effective for a brand that wasn't as known as Old Spice" and greater sales, say more about that. What I heard from people who used to know the old Old Spice is that it stings and they would not use it... so maybe there is a new product launch in the near term that this campaign was prepping the ground for? Thinking out loud here.

@Justin - by doing that, they did increase the volume and diversity of conversation. Because while celebrities and key influencers may talk something up, it's the rest of the people that make the talk interesting/useful around an idea. We'll see what that was for ;)