Well I wrote about the amazing success of the Old Spice Guy campaign a while ago, and then was alerted to some info on the web which suggested that sales of Old Spice had gone down. Now a new study is heralding Old Spice Guy as the hottest Social Media Campaign in history. I must say I prefer this version (the positive spin) as I think it is pure genius.
Brandweek notes:
There is little doubt about the viral hit’s popularity. Launched in February, the official version has racked up nearly 12.2 million YouTube views.
But sales of the featured product—Red Zone After Hours Body Wash—aren’t necessarily tracking with that consumer appeal: In the 52 weeks ended June 13, sales of the brand have dropped 7 percent according to SymphonyIRI. (That amount excludes those rung up at Walmart.) P&G execs were not available to comment.
Watch this video spelling out The Old Spice Guy’s resounding success, watch it ladies – you know you want to.
The New Gmail Priority Inbox is going to make Gmail much more viable for mainstream users. Introduced yesterday in Beta, it enables GMail users to prioritise email based on who you contact. So spammers and email marketers are going to the bottom of the pile.
This priority filter is smart – it looks at a lot of things, such as who you email a lot, who you chat with, and who you actually read email from, among other things. In effect it sifts through your communications for you puts your important people at the top of the pile and delegates what it deems to be insignificant to the bottom.
I think this move is totally in tune with the changes in marketing and personal online activity. People want to choose who they allow to suggest products to them. It may depend on an existing relationship with a current supplier or a recommendation from someone they know and trust. Just as we now fast forward through the adverts making them ineffective most of the time because we just choose not to see them, so applications such as GMail are helping us to do this with our every day communications by making intelligent decisions for us by looking at our online behaviour.
It is being rolled out gradually like Google Buzz and soon every GMail account will have. Once it’s activated on your account, you’ll see a prompt asking if you want to enable Priority Inbox. There are a few options to choose from for example:
you can choose the order of your various in-boxes
you can choose contacts you’d like to always mark ‘Important’
What’s great about it is there aren’t any rules to set up and you don’t need to ‘teach’ Gmail what is important, it just works.
Have you ever signed up for something when you really didn’t want to? Good sales people spend months, sometimes years learning to break down your resistance to the NO word. Of course you could always enrol onto our brilliant Assertiveness Training course to make it easier (next one is 14th and 15th Oct 2010), meanwhile…
Learning to recognise some of these familiar sales techniques may save you from signing up to a spectacularly unmissable waste of time and money!! …
People feel obliged to return a favour – right? Sales people exploit this by offering you small favour before getting you to sign you life away! Remember they are not really doing you a favour – REMEMBER IT’S ALL A BIG PLAN TO PART YOU WITH YOUR MONEY.
When you are made to believe something is rare (”a limited time offer!”), you want it for fear that you will loose out. If it’s not still available later/tomorrow next week etc. YOU DON’T WANT IT.
Sales people seek to find things in common with their victims, tell jokes, and pay compliments. Flattery, common interest, interest in your family/work/holiday etc, will get them everywhere. THEY ARE NOT INTERESTED IT IS ALL A PLOY.
Sales People convince their marks that they are experts in order to gain control of you. That’s why they pin pictures of themselves posing with famous people on their walls. REMEMBER YOU KNOW BEST.
People are like sheep. A Salesman will try and convince you, and often show some kind of proof that everyone else has signed up/bought in. It’s called the “social proof” technique. DON’T WORRY YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO HASN’T GOT ONE!
Sales people will set you up by asking you a question to which you will proudly admit yes to. for example “Other people think you are a great photographer right?” oooo I want it already, what is it? REMEMBER THEY SAY THAT TO ALL THE GUYS/GIRLS.
So now you are prepared you should be able to fend them off! Of course if you find it difficult to say no generally you could enrol on our Assertiveness Training course, it’s great for Confidence Building. If you spend all you time on the phone being sold stuff you could come on our Time Management Training courses, and if you want your staff to use all the above to your advantage you could organise a telephone sales training course for them so that they can become annoyingly difficult to say NO to!
You need to people to see your post especially if your blog is new. Here are some top tips for publicising your Blog. These techniques not only get traffic to your blog but also serve as a very effective way to use social media for link building – which is great for your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) .
How to Increase Traffic to your Blog, Improve Ranking and Link Building using Social Media
Search for other topic related Facebook business pages and find ones that automatically show “others” posts on their wall, you can post your link up here too.
Facebook Places use the mobile browser of any cell phone that supports HTML5 and geolocation, If you want to learn HTML you should look at our HTML5 training course – it’s the future! Although ‘Facebook Location’ is currently only available in the U.S. UK users and the rest of the world will be joining in soon – could it be the new foursquare? It is not yet known when the service, which allows users to check-in to restaurants, bars and shops, will launch in the UK. It is currently live via the Facebook iPhone app in the US and on an advanced version of its mobile site.
Facebook has said it is working with Foursquare and Yelp, to develop Places, although there is no information about how this relationship will work and it is apparent that the service could be a threat to these established giants considering it already has has over 500 million members. It is already influencing it’s competitors/collaborators. Yesterday Foursquare introduced new privacy settings, ahead of the Facebook Places launch, which make it easier for its users to hide their email addresses and phone numbers, to opt-out of automatic check-in at certain venues, and to choose which lists they appear on. It allows them to control whether or not they publish their Foursquare activity to Facebook and Twitter, and to decide whether they want businesses to know if they are a regular customer or not.
Here’s how Facebook Places works
Display your Location on Facebook
Now, or at least soon, you can broadcast your current location to your friends on Facebook now Facebook has unveiled it’s new location based service called Facebook Places
If you show your location using Facebook Places it will show you other people who may be near that place around the same time.
Who will see my location on Facebook?
As Always privacy will be a concern but this time (once bitten!) Facebook has added very simple settings allowing you control the visibility of places where you are checking-in.
Brighton SEO was a half-day conference followed by some drinks and networking in the evening, held at Community Base on Friday 23rd July, a brilliant and educational event organised by Kelvin Newman of Site Visibility.
saving this image for my bad photoshopping post!
I videoed almost all of the content and I’m sorry I haven’t posted it up sooner but I haven’t had the time. Never the less I will be uploading snippets bit by bit over the next few weeks so keep your eyes peeled. The first part features Kevin Gibbons and his wonderfully useful wordpress plugins, Cedric Wooding with an enlightening presentation on facebook advertising and Annabel Hodges thinks out of the box when it comes to search.
There’s a handy tool over at Chirrps.com which lists the current top 50 most retweeted users on Twitter.
Most of them are as you might expect but number one is maybe a little surprising -
Reverend Run, the man formerly known as the “Run” in Run-D.M.C., Rev Run is a respected rapper from hip-hop’s golden age who broke out on his own in the mid-2000s. Born Joseph Simmons in Queens. Globally renowned he even appears a subject for Brighton Graffiti Artists. To paraphrase the man himself he is the king of twitter, there is none higher – other twitter users should call him sire. He even manages to beat Justin Bieber into second place.
What can business users learn from Rev. Run?
Rev Run is not the most followed person on Twitter, he’s not even in the top 100, nor is he the most prolific, but his tweets are interesting, entertaining and show personality.
Rev. Run gives great advice (personal favourite – “When life hands u lemons, turn around & make grape juice out of it.. & shock the hell out of folks”).
Well there has been a lot of fuss about Abs Man, Hunky Guy Old Spice man, and I can understand why. It has caused such a stir that I wrote about it earlier today. But wait there’s more to this viral campaign that meets the eye.
In just a few short weeks the campaign can claim
Nearly 90,000 followers on Twitter, including a host of celebrities.
100 million views and 100,000 subscribers on YouTube
666,000 fans on Facebook
So it’s a great success yes? Well yes if your goal is to increase brand awareness, to put yourselves on the Facebook Map or become king of the twittersphere. But what about sales, what if your goal is to increase sales? What about your ROI? These questions arrived in our comment box soon after posting – thanks nicholas butler for making me think and have to write a follow up!
Today, news breaks that Old Spice sales have dropped 7% since the campaign started and critics are out in force talking about how viral marketing doesn’t equate to sales.
So before you invest in a massive marketing campaign you or your agency should be asking what your end goals are. The fact is, the highest ROI campaigns may not use Twitter, Facebook or hunky guys. It is important to have clear goals in order before you start a campaign. If the Old Spice wanted a campaign to increase the online buzz increase brand awareness, gain thousands of fans, build a network of advocates and reach a new audience with its product, while being brilliantly entertaining, then the campaign was an overwhelming success. If the goal was to increase sales then the program failed.
It would be interesting to know if sales would increase if the product itself were sexy Food for thought.
To learn more about how to use Twitter and other Social Media tools look at our 
