Now they’ve gone and outdone themselves, with a social media campaign that might be better than the TV spots. Last week, our Old Spice hero began making personalized videos for bloggers, Web celebrities, and a few average web users. Notable examples include a get-well message to Digg founder Kevin Rose, political punditry in response to George Stephanopolous, and a hilarious response to the Yahoo! Answers question “How many teeth do sharks have?”.

The videos have been a smash hit, with PCWorld calling them “the most brilliant viral ad campaign of its time”.  Total views on Old Spice’s YouTube channel are over 100 million, while Google Trends reports a huge spike in searches for Old Spice:

Click Image to Enlarge

At MLC, we never counsel members to shoot for virality in their online campaigns. What we’ve learned from discussions with countless B2C marketers is that you can check all the “viral” boxes and still have a campaign that flops. There are simply too many variables in what achieves currency on the web for any marketer to accurately predict that a campaign will go viral.

But, the subset of campaigns that do go viral do have a few of these things in common:

1) Cash. Someone may have told you that online campaigns are supposed to be cheap. Cheaper than TV, maybe, but Old Spice is spending some fairly serious money on this initiative. “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” was a sponsored trend on Twitter and the company is paying to get its branding on its YouTube channel – not to mention paying Mustafa and the video crew for long days of shooting.

2) Ego. By aiming most of the videos squarely at online influencers like Kevin Rose, Ashton Kutcher, and Ellen DeGeneres, as well as blogs like Gizmodo, Old Spice ensured that they’d have ample access to the huge network of followers commanded by those celebrities and outlets. But they didn’t stop at focusing on big names – they shot videos for all kinds of social networking users. They also engaged the ego of communities – canvassing Reddit and the notorious 4-Chan (absolutely not safe for work) for potential questions well before shooting.

3) Anticipation. Old Spice built anticipation into the campaign in a few ways – first, the quick turnaround of the videos meant was a carrot for repeat visitors; second, there was no pattern to the responses, so a reply to Ashton Kutcher might be followed by one to WebLover222; and third, the videos themselves were so wacky that users couldn’t wait to see what would come next.

4) Paradigm Shift. The campaign challenges the way people think about several things, in the process changing the way people think about the Old Spice brand. Everything from the absurd monologues to the production-line nature of the shoot to the idea of responding to random web users leads people to think differently about Old Spice.

Like I said above – you can hit all these marks and still have a flop on your hands; the vagaries of the digital market are still too much for marketers to reliably understand. But its good to know that there are some common threads – and at least a little predictability – in what makes a campaign viral.

John posted a thought-provoking interesting survey a few weeks back, asking pharma marketers what they thought the most important elements of a social media implementation plan were, particularly in the event of a crisis. 

Here are the results (image from the Pharma Marketing Blog). Since the activities are truncated on the graph, a key is below: 

The activities: 

• Unblock corporate access to social media so employees can monitor and use applications such as Facebook while at work
• Have a sustained vision/goal
• Become a dialogue company – learn how to listen and respond, not just push messages out
• Get everyone – including marketing, regulatory people, corporate communications, C-level execs – on board
• Develop guideposts, internal and external standard operating procedures
• Train people who will be interacting directly with consumers
• Develop a moderation strategy
• Marshall necessary resources – use the best tools available
• Create a social media “Tsar” position to oversee all the company’s SM projects to assure compliance with guideline

It’s interesting that these activities all fall into two broad categories – what I’ll call “tools” and “behaviors”. Unblocking access to social media sites, training, moderation strategy, and marshaling resources – those are “tools”. But sustained  goals, becoming a “dialogue company” and breaking down functional silos – those are “behaviors”. It’s clear that the marketers who answered this survey know how to use those tools; they place much less weight on them than they do the behaviors. But not everyone can set organizational priorities and move different functions to act more cooperatively – it’s clear that respondents to John’s survey have the tools, but are looking for leadership. 

In our 2010 study for B2C marketers, Close the CMO Leadership Deficit in Social Media, we argue that what’s standing between marketing teams and social media success is often a lack of executive leadership. According to our data, CMO involvement in social efforts is a strong predictor of how well companies do in the space: 

For pharma and other risk-averse industries, the message is clear: if you want to mitigate downside risk while using social media to reshape the brand-to-consumer relationship, active CMO leadership is essential. 

MLC members, learn how you can more effectively lead your organization’s social media efforts at one of our upcoming Annual Executive Retreats, or attend our July 14 webinar, Building a Socially Intelligent Enterprise: Closing the CMO Leadership Gap in Social Media.

What makes Twelpforce the right social media investment for Best Buy?

“First, it meets consumer needs. We sell stuff that can be hard to understand and consumers don’t want to do all the learning themselves. Second, competitors will struggle to replicate Twelpforce because it will take a long time to gain the experience we’ve collected over the years. When we say our employees are at the center of our strategy, we prove it in an initiative like this.  The more we demonstrate our savvy and offer this support service, the less consumers are willing to waste time working these things out themselves. That gives us an edge over the competition.”

How did you accelerate network growth (of both Twelpforce staff and consumers)?

“We used traditional media, such as TV ads and point-of-purchase notes, to accelerate consumer uptake. Internally, we tapped existing employee behavior and leveraged passionates.  It wasn’t a hard sell for staff who were already on Twitter.  We said, ‘You guys are already out there, would you like to help customers in this space while you’re working?’ That helped us get to critical mass quickly.”

Are there any incentives to encourage staff to participate in Twelpforce?

“Through heavy participation in Twelpforce, staff earn the right to help provide input to some of the strategic decisions made in the social space.  We’re also seeing more and more of our Twelpforce team members stepping into experimental “social” roles in-store that they are now more prepared for.”

What training do you offer Twelpforce staff?

“At the start, coaching took a lot of time and effort.  We had to keep reiterating that Twelpforce is about helping not selling.  Now though, the @twelpforce team is largely self-governing.  Those that have been with us for a while will mentor and coach those new to the effort.  While I lead the implementation of broad-reaching tools, the 1:1 coaching is a shared responsibility across the group.  If a new employee posts something suboptimal, someone will say ‘check out this FAQ on tone’. I make myself available for help at any time, but it’s rare that I step in and handle “issues”, as those are largely handled by the team.”

How do you help staff share knowledge?

“We have a tool – www.bbyfeed.com – that captures every interaction taking place on Twelforce (and will soon be expanding to capture interactions on a variety of platforms). It has simple search features that enable staff to pull up every conversation on a specific topic.  For a retail company, turnover is a fact of life, and knowledge sharing is essential.  Additionally, staff can post extra information without being bound to 140 characters. So, if one employee says, ‘I identified a new virus and found out how to box it in,’ another might add, ‘I found this cure for it…’ while a third could say, ‘and here’s how to prevent it.’”

How do you measure the returns on Twelpforce?

“We look at cost displacement (calls avoided) and quality and speed of service, as well as revenue influenced, and positive press generated. Although Twelpforce isn’t about Marketing or PR, we still measure its value in traditional Marketing/PR terms to demonstrate its full worth.”

What role did your CMO, Barry Judge, play in setting up Twelpforce?

“Without Barry, this stuff doesn’t happen. He put his capital on the line to pilot Twelpforce when it was an unknown idea. He is largely responsible for getting senior leaders on board and getting us involved in this space.”

Speaking more broadly, how do you see social media changing the way brands market to consumers?

“Social media is about relationship building, not marketing and not even relationship-based marketing. You could say that Twelpforce is marketing without marketing. It uses other parts of the enterprise to fulfill brand promises. There is a time and place for broadcast, but it isn’t here – here it’s about providing value and relevance. We give more than we take, but ultimately that will lead to more purchases.”

Check out the latest advice on Twelpforce here: http://twitter.com/TWELPFORCE

MLC members, learn how to identify your brand’s social media “sweet spot” using our Social Media Strategy Builder.

As we begin to dig around for some new ideas, Council members have pointed us to an emerging trend: their best ideas are coming from outside the walls of their companies, or at least outside of traditional marketing and R&D functions.  “Outside-the-walls innovation” generally shows up in one of three flavors:

1. Customers: Social media channels and general digital connectivity are dramatically increasing the scale and decreasing the costs of getting customers involved in innovation.  One of my favorite recent examples is Dell’s IdeaStorm forum.
2. Employees: Much like the customer dynamic, social and digital channels are making it much faster and easier to get a critical mass of our employees involved in innovation.  Last year I had a chance to talk with John Nevins, head of innovation consulting at BT, on their efforts to make participation in innovation more available to the employee masses (Council members can listen in on that conversation here).
3. Other Companies: Perhaps my favorite approach, we’re seeing companies invest heavily in partnerships to fast-cycle innovation, both on the idea generation front and the idea commercialization front.  In a recent conversation with Todd Thompson at Avery Dennison, Todd explained how Avery has loosened its grip on promising ideas in an effort to get partner companies more involved in early-stage development.  While Avery gives up a little IP, they get speed-to-market, cost advantages, and new capabilities in return (check out a quick debrief on that conversation here).

Customers, Employees, and Other Companies certainly aren’t new-to-world sources for great ideas, but as technology makes it easier to capture diverse inputs, casting a wider net for ideas is becoming much more practical.  The Dell IdeaStorm forum mentioned above illustrates the trend—these customers were always out there, and they’ve always had feedback.   Dell just made it a lot easier for customers to voice their ideas and for Dell’s product managers to listen.

One last thought: regardless of the tactics we employ, any innovation strategy requires that we keep customer outcomes top of mind.  Great innovations don’t win or lose based on technical superiority—they help the target customer accomplish something they otherwise couldn’t.

For a quick primer on innovating with customer outcomes in mind, MLC members should check out this tutorial: understanding what customers really want.

Essentially, your Web site is the hardest-working representative your company has—out there day and night, in every market, engaged in countless battles for mindshare among potential customers.  But if your site is the equivalent of the low-performing rep (i.e., the online warehouse for product information and sales brochures), then that’s a serious handicap for Sales. 

In our recent work on B2B website effectiveness we see two waves of evolution in site design among the most progressive B2B companies:

1.  Solutions Configuration—These sites are designed to help prospects visualize the value of broader combinations of products and services. They dedicate more real estate to the company’s full breadth of capabilities and provide different mechanisms (often interactive) for visualizing how different combinations can work together to solve certain customer issues or create certain capabilities for customers.  This approach helps the supplier create exposure for a broader set of products and services, but it also helps the buyer who is midway through their buying process and still trying to get a handle on how to think about solutions to their problems.  Many B2B sites make some attempt at solutions configuration within their site—Avaya is a good example.

2.  Decision Support Centers—These sites are designed to facilitate entire buying processes, providing useful information for buyers and directing them along the way. Beyond just solutions configuration, these sites are useful early on in the buying process (when it comes to helping prospects conceptualize the problem they should be solving for) and later in the process (when buyers are trying to reach internal consensus on purchase decisions and anticipate what it will look like to become a customer).  The web site for Akamai, a leading IT company, is very advanced in providing decision support for prospects up and down the purchase process.

The sites in this last category are very broad in the types of decisions they support, extending up and down the purchase process.  In doing so, they can create dynamic, sustained interaction (what some might call “stickiness”) and gradually influence and shape buyer perceptions in a way that ultimately helps the supplier win business. 

In other words, these sites are helpful and valuable for buyers, but at the same time they are directive as to what is and is not important—and so the web experience itself leads buyers on a learning journey that arrives at YOU as the logical choice in suppliers.  It seeks to reframe how the buyer assigns value to different things in a way that makes you appear most favorable.  In short—it does what the best sales reps would do.

Amidst this flurry of content production, most marketers optimize their content according to search engine algorithms (deeming it highly “relevant”) rather than to buyers’ information needs. You may conclude that such marketers care more about luring visitors to their site (and coercing them to hand over their contact information in exchange for content viewing privileges) than actually presenting meaningful, useful content to potential buyers.  If Marketing’s value to the enterprise is solely measured in number of qualified leads produced, this is expected behavior—the incentives explain it all.  

But most Marketers are actually accountable for a much broader measure of commercial performance.  Therefore, rather than merely attracting attention and collecting lead data, they should instead focus online content production and web design to provide actual decision-support (i.e., prioritize usefulness over relevance). The savviest B2B online marketers are building decision support portfolios—a content portfolio which fills information gaps at key points across a buyer’s purchase experience, and presents a clear path for progressing with the supplier across each decision point.  

How does your decision support portfolio measure up?

MLC Members: See the framework for structuring an online content portfolio in our recent work on understanding B2B Web Site effectiveness.