the key value of social media for retailers is that it activates the referral value of promoters (from ‘would recommend’ to ‘do recommend’), and allows them to monetize that value with hard sales and new customers

[Disclosure: Ford of Europe are a We Are Social client]

Picking over the Old Spice campaign
Now that the Old Spice YouTube campaign, which Jordan covered so well here last week, has ended, the social media bloggerati have been circling and picking it over. Some were quick to point out that Old Spices’ sales had apparently declined in wake of the campaign; ambulance chasers. Problem was, the story wasn’t that simple – the data referred to the year before the campaign. In the past three months up to the YouTube campaign (when other elements such as TV have been running), Old Spice’s sales are in fact up. It always helps to look at these stories within the wider context, and over at Warc there’s a wider discussion of the relationship between campaign visibility and sales. That said, now the story’s gone slightly cold, I can’t find reporting on the very latest data, two weeks after the campaign, to see what the post-campaign effect has been. In case you want to copy pay homage to it with your own Old Spice-style campaign, SocialFresh give a few clues as to how they executed it so slickly and enjoyably.

BP get caught out with photoshop hoax
Another company showing us what happens behind the scenes is BP, who last week released a press of their command centre in response to the ongoing catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. Only problem was, they photoshopped the pictures to make them look more active than they actually were, filling in some blank screens. The many eyes of social media duly called them out, before finding a second example of manipulation, this time of a helicopter. Inevitably, it wasn’t long before an array of spoofs appeared – as collated by the Huffington Post. BP’s reputation has been taking an absolute battering in social media during the Gulf crisis – so much so that @BPGlobalPR, a spoof Twitter account lambasting their has ten times the followers of their official account. BP are just the latest example of how social media campaigns on environmental and social issues can damage a brand, as this interesting interview with Laura Kenyon of Greenpeace, who recently successfully used social media to campaign against Nestle’s use of palm oil, shows.

Adobe take real v. fake debate by the horns
The use of Photoshop is ubiquitous today, and the power of social media makes it very easy to question and uncover fakery – with blogs such as Photoshop Disasters showing off the very worst. So perhaps it’s no surprise that Adobe have taken this issue by the horns and used it to create a clever campaign to drive awareness among students with a “Real or Fake?” game on Facebook. It’s a good example of taking an issue about your product that people are talking about already, rather than what you’d like to think they’re talking about, and using that debate to frame your product and your brand.

Social networking stats, and the emergence of Facebook as a state
There was statporn galore this week – with the BBC providing a very clear infographic based on data from Nielsen. The Guardian go one better and have created a mashup of Facebook usage data and world population data to create a heatmap of Facebook use worldwide – the usual suspects like the US and UK are unsurprisingly popular, but the maps also shows interesting local variations (such as those in South America). Facebook’s global reach and popularity has given rise to this thoughtful article in the Economist. Facebook’s population (now over 500 million) is greater than most of the world’s countries; while it is patently not a country itself, with its own currency and “laws”, and an understanding it needs to rule with the consent of its users, and its chief executive meeting politicians such as David Cameron, it is increasingly having to take on the mentality of a country in how it governs itself and maintains external relationships.

Gatwick Airport to operate customer services on Twitter
Gatwick Airport have started rolling out handling customer feedback on Twitter; big screens round the airport will invite travellers and customers to leave comments (positive or negative) with staff trained up dedicated to handle any problems or complaints. The rollout is incremental – their Twitter team will only work during office hours, and they have no plans to publish Tweets (good or bad) from the public on the screens, only their own, but baby steps are better than no steps at all. You can keep tabs on how they’re doing by following them on @gatwick_airport.

Eliason leaves Comcast for Citigroup
Frank Eliason, better known as @comcastcares, and responsible for a much-admired turnaround in how Comcast dealt with its customers in social media, has left Comcast for a similar role with Citigroup. Frank’s work has been a pioneering example of how to improve brand engagement in big business; he and the Comcast brand have become synonymous in the Twittersphere, and the gap left by his departure shows how integral being human is to your presence online.

This year’s WTF update is meant less to be a celebration of numbers, and more a discussion about how the medium is evolving

Just over two years ago, back on the 25th June 2008, Nathan and I officially founded We Are Social Ltd.

In that time, we’ve grown from two people working from wherever we could get a WiFi signal to 38 of us spread across offices in London, Paris, Milan and Sydney, doing work we’re really proud of with some of the world’s best brands and even picking up a few awards along the way.

None of this would have been possible without the amazing team of people we’ve been lucky enough to have join us on our journey. So on Friday we celebrated in style with the whole team at Lovebox.

It was fun. It was very social. Legends were made.

    We Are social celebrates its second birthday in style

Here’s to the next two years…

A nice deck from our friend Dan Calladine at Isobar, highlighting the most important news over the last three months in ‘next generation media’.

In Asia Pacific, online product reviews are the third most trusted source of information when making purchase decisions, behind family and friends. This is particularly so for purchases of consumer electronics, cosmetics and cars – products where consumers are most likely to base their purchase decisions on online product reviews.

The report looks at Internet usage across Korean, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, India, Singapore and China.

Foursquare in talks with Google, MS and Yahoo! about search partnerships
The Telegraph reports that Foursquare is in talks with the three major search engines which could allow people to look up the most popular bar or restaurant in their area in real-time. Dennis Crowley, Foursquare’s co-founder, has said:

Our data generates hugely interesting trends which would enrich search… Twitter helped the world and the search engines know what people are talking about. Foursquare would allow people to search for the types of place people are going to – and where is trending

It’s worth noting that Twitter’s first commercial deals were with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft, licensing its real-time feed of information.

Say Hello to the New MySpace Profiles
After reports of falling traffic figures, it looks as though MySpace is trying to change its fortunes by completely redesigning its user profiles. MySpace confirmed that it was demoing a new look and feel to the site, which includes:

• An improved UI and navigation menu
• A Facebook like newsfeed with a user’s recent activity
• Social network integration with other sites like Facebook or Twitter

Facebook will announce 500 million users; announces 150 million on mobile
In anticipation of hitting the half billion user mark, Facebook is planning to mark the occasion with a new consumer marketing initiative called ‘Facebook stories’ in which they hope to celebrate the impact of the social network on their users’ lives.

The announcement is expected any day now, and will sit alongside other large milestones announced last week, such as hitting 141 million unique visitors in the US (comScore). There are also an estimated 150 global mobile users, according to Facebook’s Head of Mobile Products Eric Tseng, who also indicated last week that we can expect to see Facebook’s “Like” buttons in mobile applications soon.

The New York Times notes that with this impressive growth, comes some grim challenges at the social network grapples with how to handle deaths in the system as older users die:

Now, people over 65 are adopting Facebook at a faster pace than any other age group, with 6.5 million signing up in May alone… People over 65, of course, also have the country’s highest mortality rate, so the problem is only going to get worse.

That said, big steps have been made to improve the ease with which ‘ghosts in its machine’ are identified, and profiles can be “memorialised” such that grieving friends can still post messages on those pages as a tribute.

Apple deleting mentions of Consumer Reports’ iPhone 4 piece on forums
Since the iPhone 4’s release last month, Apple has been going through a bit of a rough time with widespread reports of an antenna design flaw that was causing the mobile signal to degrade and calls to be dropped.

Consumer Reports last week released independent findings that confirmed there was a design flaw with the iPhone 4 which caused problems with its reception. This news spread quickly online, but Apple made the questionable decision of  “deleting threads about the Consumer Reports article from its support forums”, which deepened the crisis further.

Old Spice social media campaign
Last week Old Spice / Wieden+Kennedy turned a lot of heads with its innovative use of social media for its ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’ campaign. We’ve twice written about the campaign so it needs little summary here – head over to our previous posts to learn more.

Starbucks is the first brand to reach 10 million Facebook fans
Following on the heels of Lady Gaga becoming the first ‘person’ to gather 10 million fans, Starbucks has now become the first brand to collect 10 million fans for its Facebook page. According to Inside Facebook:

The company’s audience of 10 million people around the world has been hard won with marketing, promotions and advertising. Over the years Starbucks has given away free ice cream on Facebook, been recognized by Facebook [for fan page innovation] and was also the most popular brand [on the social network].

Ben & Jerry’s drops email in favour of social media
Ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s is looking to abandon its current email marketing activity in favour of using social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, to engage with customers on an ongoing basis. The decision was based on the feedback they received from customers who would prefer being contacted via social media.  Ben & Jerry’s still plans to send one email update to customers each year, and the company has received “mainly positive feedback on the decision” thus far.

K2 Skis redirects entire company website to Facebook
K2 Skis has made the bold decision to redirect the company’s entire website to its Facebook Fan Page in an effort to boost its fan base. By becoming a Fan of their page, users will be able to see next year’s line up.  All Facebook notes that this is the first time they’ve “ever seen a company shut down their corporate site as part of a promotion,” but it doesn’t appear to be driving significant numbers just yet.

BT uses social media to decide ending for TV ad campaign
BT has taken to Facebook in order to have the public decide the ending to their long-running ‘Adam and Jane’ TV ad campaign. Fans of the “Please don’t let Adam and Jane off the BT home hub advert break up…” Facebook group were given a sneak peak of the ad before it aired this weekend, and asked to vote on the ending which will be aired in late August.

The Human Avatar

The internet is a dark dark place. And Josh is their plaything

This just about sums up The Human Avatar campaign for EA’s new game All Points Bulletin (APB).  To tie in with the customisation available in the new game, APB decided to take a real person and over the course of several weeks transform them into a real-life avatar that will be released in the game – all to be decided by votes via their website. After selecting the candidate Josh, users then voted on his haircut (cyber punk), piercing (septum) and tattoo (back wings).

After the third day of activity, Isaiah Mustafa and Old Spice have bid farewell to their ‘Internet friends’ and recorded their final YouTube video. Much has been written about the campaign over the last few days (see our case study with links here), and the buzz on blogs and Twitter have been explosive.

Here at We Are Social, we were a bit curious as to what the viewing figures looked like so we had a closer look at the Old Spice YouTube Channel. This is what we found:

• Total videos uploaded: 183
  • 12 July, 2010: 29 videos uploaded
  • 13 July, 2010: 89 videos uploaded
  • 14 July, 2010: 65 videos uploaded
• Combined viewing figures: 10,954,096
• Average video view (mean value): 59,858 views
• Median value: 40,536 views (Re: Idgit | Old Spice)
• Most watched video: 511,694 views (Re: Perez Hilton | Old Spice)

15 Most Popular Videos

YouTube viewing figures are based on data collection ending 14:00 BST (09:00 EDT, 06:00 PDT) 15th July 2010
View raw data here

Among these popular videos, celebrities and key online figures standout like Perez Hilton, Alyssa Milano and Kevin Rose. The video directed at ‘Anonymous’ deserves a special mention:

According to ReadWriteWeb:

How loved has the new campaign proven to be? 4Chan, the anonymous nihilist obscene messageboard from whence sprang memes like LOLCats and RickRolling, was the subject of [Anonymous]… 4channers hate everything, especially people who talk about 4chan – which this savvy man in a towel did not do.

And now it occupies the second most watched spot, which is no small feat.

This covers off on the publicly available viewing figures (which have surely grown during the time of writing this), but there is surely so much more that can be learned from how the online audience behaved with this campaign and from the viewing behaviour on YouTube. Things like:

• Comments – Which videos were the most discussed/engaging? Was there any discussion of purchase preference or the Old Spice product in these comments, and how can this be fed back into product marketing and development?
• Demographics – Which audience(s) did this campaign appeal to the most? What is the age/gender make up, and the geographic spread of viewers? How does this compare with Old Spice’s target customer?
• Sharing data – How did the Old Spice videos make their way across the web? How did videos reach secondary and tertiary audiences? What were the most important platforms in driving this reach (Twitter vs. Facebook vs. Reddit vs. Digg vs. blogs)?
• Embed data – Who and what were the most popular / influential sources to embed the videos? What was the ratio of views on YouTube, compared to views of videos embedded elsewhere?

The opportunities for measurement are almost endless, and Wieden + Kennedy / Proctor & Gamble are sitting on some very interesting data behind the YouTube account login. We definitely hope to learn more over the coming months.

Time above shown in BST, which is 5 hours ahead of EDT, and 8 hours ahead of PDT

Meanwhile Twitter over the last few days has been busy:

Twitter data collection ended 13:30 BST (08:30 EDT, 05:30 PDT) 15th July 2010, query: “Old Spice” OR oldspice

Since 13 July 2010 there’s been about 175K Old Spice related tweets, and they were broken down as follows:

26% were retweets, which indicates how readily people passed around the content online. Meanwhile 8% were @replies, and the overwhelming majority of those were directed at @oldspice, showing that people were quite keen to get involved (even me). The remaining ‘regular tweets’ were, by and large, people commenting about the ‘old spice guy’/’old spice man’ videos as they watched, and shared the YouTube links. A cursory read of these Tweets were found to be extremely positive, which probably comes as no surprise. A word cloud, drawn from a sample of 10,000 Tweets from 13 July – 15 July tends to support this:

The words “Old Spice” and “@oldspice” were removed from the word cloud for clarity.

It’s worth noting that words like hilarious, like, love and awesome are among the 50 most prominent words of the 157,849 rendered in the word cloud.

So what now? It appears that Wieden + Kennedy and Old Spice have created a bit of a monster, but have phased out activity while it was still fresh and universally liked. I imagine the video viewcount will continue to climb as people make their way through all 183 videos, and the Twitter buzz will likely calm down. I expect attitudes towards the brand will remain positive, though it will be really interesting to see if this translates directly into sales.

As succesful as this campaign has been however, I can’t say that I envy the people behind it… I mean, how do they top that? Naturally, we’re hoping they (or perhaps even, we) do!

“The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” spot from Wieden + Kennedy Portland was launched in February during the Super Bowl. It featured Isaiah Mustafa, a former NFL athlete, being totally awesome and became an almost immediate hit online. It has since racked up almost 13 million views on YouTube, with a couple new iterations launched in recent weeks.

Yesterday, however, the marketing campaign took a different turn and really got ‘social media right’. It’s been updated and sees Isaiah Mustafa respond directly to YouTube comments, Tweets, Yahoo! Answers and blog posts about him in 117 publicly available, timely and personalised video messages.

To ensure maximum coverage Old Spice replied to some of the most popular personalities on Twitter, such as @Biz (Twitter co-founder), @ryanseacrest (TV personality), @kevinrose (Digg founder), @Alyssa_Milano (actor), and @guykawasaki (social media thought leader). Blogger Perez Hilton’ s video response has already clocked up over 115k views. They’ve also hit up media outlets like GQ, Huffington Post, Gizmodo and The Ellen Show. Starbucks have even managed to get in on the action.

So what are the results? It’s still early to tell, but a few things are apparent.

The activity, according to Campaign, appears to be targeted at the ‘Twitter generation’ and it seems to be doing the trick. There has been a noticeable increase in followers to the @oldspice account, as well as a surge in conversation volume about the brand over the past 24 hours.

Searches for “old spice” or oldspice for the last week up until 10.45am today turned up the following:

That’s pretty spectacular, and the volumes were enough for Old Spice to trend on Twitter. What’s interesting though, is that Old Spice started yesterday as a Twitter Promoted Trend, but quickly ‘earned’ the status. TechCrunch explains:

[Old Spice] also just redefined the model for Promoted Trends. Old Spice is a promoted Trend, which takes you to the Old Spice Twitter account highlighting these videos as individual responses addressing each Twitter user who gets their own Old Spice commercial. The irony is that if Old Spice hadn’t paid to be a promoted Trend, it probably would have made it as a Trending Topic organically.

This morning Old Spice is still trending, organically.

There has been a similar increase in discussion on blogs as well. Again, a simple search for “old spice” or oldspice for the last week up until 11.45am today turned up the following:

But a key question is: can this goodwill and online buzz translate into sales?

Though the original adverts have been a massive hits, and clocked up millions of views on YouTube, sales of Old Spice haven’t necessarily seen the same upward trend. Just yesterday AdWeek reported that sales of the Old Spice body wash have actually dropped 7 percent over the last year.

So this surge of social media activity certainly comes at an interesting time, and it will be worth keeping an eye on, especially as brands like Dominos Pizza publicly pin their good fortunes on social media activity.

Ultimately, this level of social media engagement which was born from a television advert is really remarkable. Old Spice has done a great job in updating the campaign so that it really ‘works’ online. Most importantly though, the video responses are consistently funny in their own right, making it hard not to love this campaign.

So on that note, we’ll leave you with Isaiah Mustafa’s responses to The Huffington Post, Guy Kawasaki and Perez Hilton – some of the finest examples:

Huffington Post

Guy Kawasaki

Perez Hilton

Update: ReadWriteWeb has the lowdown on how the Old Spice videos are being made:

A team of creatives, tech geeks, marketers and writers gathered in an undisclosed location in Portland, Oregon yesterday and produced 87 short comedic YouTube videos about Old Spice. In real time. They leveraged Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and blogs. They dared to touch the wild beasts of 4chan and they lived to tell the tale. Everybody loved it; those videos and 74 more made so far today have now been viewed more than 4 million times and counting. Here’s how it’s going down…

Fast Company also have an interview with our old friend Iain Tait who’s been working on the project:

One of the unique things taking place in the studio is we have a team of social media people, we have the Old Spice community manager, we have a social media strategist, a couple of technical people, and a producer. And we’ve built an application that scans the Internet looking for mentions and allows us to look at the influence of those people and also what they’ve said. They’re working in collaboration with the creative team that are there to pick out the messages that: 1. Have creative opportunity to produce amazing content; or 2. Have the ability to then embed themselves in an interesting or virally relevant community.

Iain also gives more background on the project on his own blog.

And now it seems, the end has arrived, with this closing message from Isaiah:

Update 2: We’ve conducted some in-depth analysis into the results of the campaign – Old Spice videos viewed 11 million times.