Old Spice has been the talk of the town for some months with their new commercial “Old Spice- The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”. The ad, with the unexpected closing line, quickly went viral and soon had over 5 million views on Youtube and scooped the Cannes Film Lion Grand Prix award last month.

Now they’ve taken it truly “social” and have released videos answering tweets, Facebook messages, Youtube comments and Reddit comments. Covering questions, statements and general comments, the videos are not only hilarious, but they’re all on brand. They also manage to maintain the Old Spice message without losing the personal focus that made the ad so famous.

The responses range from your average anonymous commenter to Ashton Kutcher, The Huffington Post and The Ellen Show. Everyone is thrilled with the unexpected response and so it’s retweeted to their followers and a new audience is realised. Each video has already topped over 3000 views in a few hours with some topping 120,000.

How are you responding to the comments about your brand?

Socialncomics published Social Media Revolution 2 last month. A refresh on the original video, the statistics show how much has changed in less than a year and pulls together even more platforms.

Stats from Video (sources listed below by corresponding #)

1. Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30-years-old
2. 96% of them have joined a social network
3. Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
4. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
5. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
6. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…
7. Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year
8. iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
9. We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it.”
10. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest ahead of the United States and only behind China and India
11. Yet, QQ and Renren dominate China
12. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
13. 80% of companies use social media for recruitment; % of these using LinkedIn 95%
14. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
15. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the  populations of Ireland, Norway, or Panama.  Note I have adjusted the language here after someone pointed out the way it is phrased in the video was difficult to determine if it was combined.
16. 50% of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
17. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé – some universities have stopped distributing e-mail accounts
18. Instead they are distributing: eReaders + iPads + Tablets
19. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
20. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
21. While you watch this 100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube
22. Wikipedia has over 15 million articles…studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
23. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
24. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
25. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $1,712.32 per hour
26. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
27. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
28. Do you like what they are saying about your brand? You better.
29. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
30. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
31. Only 14% trust advertisements
32. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
33. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
34. Kindle eBooks Outsold Paper Books on Christmas
35. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation
36. 60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily
37. We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
38. We will non longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media
39. Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate
40. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men Listening first, selling second
41. The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years
42. Bonus: comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network

See the full list of sources here for a better understanding of how the data was gathered.

Video and statistics via Socialnomics

SOCIAL MEDIA CASE STUDY: ANZ BANKING :: WOMENS SEGMENT

Client: ANZ Customer Segmentation

Campaign: FebuSave

Time Period: Mid December 2009 – Mid March 2010

ANZ launched a new nationwide campaign to encourage women to develop a regular savings habit following research that found 53% of women do not save money on a regular basis.

Research commissioned by ANZ into the savings habits of women found:

• One in five women surveyed said they typically spend all their pay packet or regularly dip into their savings for basic living expenses.
• More than half (58%) have less than $5,000 in savings and 33% less than $1,000.
• 51% of women would last less than three months on their current savings if they lost their job and still had to pay their usual bills.

In an effort to raise awareness of these issues in the community and encourage Australian women to set financial goals and take action towards achieving them, ANZ created ‘FebuSave’ – a month-long savings initiative that ran from 1st to 28th February 2010. At the end of the month, FebuSave participants reported back on how they performed against their savings goal, with three ‘FebuSave’ participants being rewarded with $5,000 in an ANZ savings account of their choice.

The Social Media Challenge:

• Using social media, how could ANZ create awareness and capture the engagement of Australian women online?
• Could social media participants rally Australian women to take part and have fun with Febusave, whilst creating debate about the financial security of Australian women?
• Would social media increase participation in FebuSave? (Target several thousand in the inaugural year) How could ANZ leverage social media with its own limited participation? (For example, not having a Twitter presence for FebuSave)

The Solution:

Identify Five influential women who are active online social media participants were identified. These were:

• Deborah Robinson, Founder of www.australianwomenonline.com.au
• Sandra D’Souza, Founder of www.askher.com.au
• Leigh Sundstrom, Founder of www.allforwomen.com.au

Three were founders of the most successful online communities for Australian women. As well as:

Australia’s leading wedding blogger, Dorothy Polka of “Polka Dot Bride

Leading and active social commentator, Kate Carruthers, with her own popular blog

Engagement

ANZ under-took one-on-one engagement with the five identified online influencers, rather than a general blog outreach program ANZ’s research on Women and Money was shared with the online influencers to assist in formulating the social content strategy.

The approach for FebuSave was a “conversation of story telling” about financial decisions that women face (These stories ranged from getting in serious debt over wedding plans and saving for financial goals, to specific relationship issues with money and questioning if there’s enough to retire on)

Social Content & Distribution Strategy

The social content strategy was set as organic storytelling and content distribution, through word of mouth, rather than provision of fixed materials from ANZ.

Recruitment

The five influential online women were engaged as official Blog Ambassadors for FebuSave. They were also happy to recruit other blog FebuSave supporters from their networks. ANZ provided the research information, but there was no “on message” focus. Each blog ambassador shared their own insight into women’s relationship with money, its importance and how they may like to write about FebuSave for their audiences.

Wider Media Content Strategy & Social Engagement

ANZ provided a web platform for the FebuSave campaign, with ambassadors featured on, www.febusave.com, and a blog badge widget. All ongoing interactions with the blog ambassadors and the wider blog supporters were a personal one-to-one engagement basis. The blog ambassadors also made social connections to the FebuSave media ambassador, Antonia Kidman and prominent FebuSave supporters, including Sarah Wilson.

The campaign was also supported by print, broadcast and online media and via traffic generated from www.anz.com. The website content focus was on how much women could save from giving ‘something up’ from coffee to shopping to shoes, and encouraged participants to focus on their own savings goal.

It offered savings advice from coaches, access to helpful tools and enabled participants to share their savings tips. The widget focus was on how many women were giving up a regular source of expenditure and saving to build community. ANZ also created an incentive by offering a competition for those who participated in FebuSave. Participants could win one of three $5000 savings accounts.

The Results:

Approximately 50% of traffic sources to the site were linked to social media, with many thousands of pages indexed on Google, pushing SEO results. In excess of 2,600 blog posts were generated by the five blog ambassadors, their recruited blog FebuSave supporters (a team of 28 leading online influential women) and a wider net of bloggers.

The originating posts drove a 61% message repeat on social networks. More than 9,200 participants signed up to FebuSave, far exceeding ANZ’s initial expectations. Over 4,500 savings tips were posted to FebuSave by participants, demonstrating a high level of engagement and passion.

The Team:

Client: ANZ Customer Segmentation & Network Marketing

Social Media: Bendalls Group

Creative: M&C Saatchi

Public Relations: ANZ/Pulse Communication

If a person only read the Australian newspaper then the constant pro-Apple iPad coverage might convince them that the iPad will be the saviour of publishers and newspapers, a return to the glorious analog past when content was scarce and people were happy to pay a lot of money for it.

However it will a lot take more than the iPad to save publishers and newspapers from their current death spiral of falling revenues and frequent rounds of sacking journalists.

Here are some thoughts from leading thinkers in the area:

Jay Rosen (Respected media critic, teaches journalism at NYU)

Alan Kohler in Business Spectator

Unlike the iPod and the iPhone, the iPad does not look like a revolutionary device, although there’ll no doubt be a (smallish) market for it. And it definitely won’t rescue newspapers.

The big problem for newspaper companies is not that their customers don’t want to read their products on smartphones and laptops: they all have ‘unique browsers’ by the millions – far more readers online in fact than they have reading newspapers.

No – their problem is that advertising revenues have collapsed because online ads are more accountable and there are a lot more of them.

Media is no longer a cartel in which the publishers control the price and tell lies about the effectiveness of the ads. It has become a business with very low barriers to entry and more competition, and now the customers – that is, the advertisers – can measure exactly what they are getting for their money.

The result is that online advertising revenue per unit is, on average, one-tenth of what is in print.

Gawker TV interviews: Nicholas Carlson (Business Insider), Dan Frommer (Business Insider), Seth Porges (Popular Mechanics), Ray Wert (Jalopnik) and John Biggs (Crunchgear)

With fashion bloggers making it to the front row of fashion shows and having more and more influence in the world of fashion. Australian fashion bloggers have come together under Helen Lee (SassyBella) to form iBlogFashion. Lee has created a site to help fashion bloggers and PR companies, marketers and fashion labels get on the same page and really push Australian fashion labels forward.

Designed as a resource, edition one features a twenty page directory of Australian fashiuon bloggers, each with a bio, statistics and contact information.

Lee has also compiled “All You Need To know About Fashion Blogging For Public Relations Executives & Marketers”. The eight page guide is invaluable for any PR company- in fashion or otherwise. Lee discusses all aspects of understanding fashion bloggers- from the great heights some have gone to, to measuring return on investment to tips on approaching bloggers.

IBlogFashion edition one is available for download from the website, where you can also sign up for future newsletters.

But the challenge is not about having a Fan Page on Facebook or a video on YouTube. These things are the baselines. They are the price that we all now must pay to sit at the table of the consumer. The real challenge is to use these sites in a way that takes advantage of the viral expansion loop – the in-built business model that brings the power of networks to bear upon the content that you (or your advocates) have created.

Ikea, however, have been able to creatively engage their audiences using a wide digital footprint and a strong and creative strategy. This short video neatly summarises what they did and how it delivered exceptional value for the business.

Return on investment into social media has become a big question. What will the time you spend in this new space do? Is it worth it?

This video by Socialnomics shows some of the amazing results businesses have had.

See the full list of sources on the Socialnomics blog.

(Click to enlarge)

Credits:
Agency: Ursa
Executive Creative Director: Denis Mamo
Art Director: Helen Shortis
Copywriter: Geoff Fischer
Mardi Le Page, Managing Director
Lisa Stevens, Senior Account Manager.
Client: Aged Care Services Australia (ACSA)
Policy Manager: Pat Sparrow,
Chris Hornsey, Media Manager
Annette Glenister-Walker, Corporate Relationship Manager
Agency Producer: Ian Ford
Video Prod Co: Cutting Edge
Prod Co Producer: Sharon Pearson
Head of compositing: Hugh Seville
Photographer: Ian McPherson
Retouching: Cream, Damien Notter
Typographer: Kristian Molloy
Web Design: Nick Bailey, Helen Shortis
Web production: WDC
Social Media: Fi Bendall
Digital Media: emitch
Print Media: Mitchell & Partners

I had a press pass to the Sydney/San Francisco Future of Influence Summit 2009 on 1 Sept 2009 where topics like these were covered: Influence as the new center of the marketing world, How influence drives content and publishing and the shape of the emerging reputation economy.

Some of the speakers included: Howard Rheingold, Duncan Riley (The Inquisitr), Tim Burrowes (Mumbrella) and Wendy Hogan (CBS).

The following is a Coveritlive transcript of the conversation which occurred on Twitter during the event using the hashtag #foi09

The video “Social Media Revolution” by Socialnomics has been spreading around the internet for the past few weeks and I think it’s a good snapshot view of just how much social media platforms are changing the way we live and work.

Stats from Video (sources listed below by corresponding #)

1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
2. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
3. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
4. Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
5. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
6. Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
7. comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
8. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
9. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
10. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
11. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
12. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama
13. 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
14. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
15. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
16. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
17. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
18. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
19. 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
20. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
21. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
22. Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
23. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
24. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
25. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them
26. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
27. Only 14% trust advertisements
28. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
29. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
30. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
31. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
32. According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
33. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
34. In the near future we will no longer search for products and services they will find us via social media
35. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
36. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
37. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser

See the full list of sources here for a better understanding of how the data was gathered.

Video and statistics via Socialnomics