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.
I couldn't possibly agree more. On one side you've got Fast Company's incredibly stupid project designed to essentially find the world's best social spammers, and on the other hand you've got W+K showing the world that there is value in understanding, and appealing to, the geeks of the world who are out there on YouTube, Digg, and Reddit actually making things "go viral".
Right before I left Freestyle Interactive I gave a short presentation on Internet memes, where they came from, why the communities that build them are important to understand, and how we might think about leveraging them as part of larger campaigns. I wish more people in the tech space took this seriously.
You can't force something to go viral—but you can try. You don't do that by trying to find the person with the most followers on Twitter or the most fans on Facebook. You don't do that by putting "like" buttons everywhere. You do it by creating good content. And good social media content is that which is aware of where it lives, and how it travels across the tubes.
