www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghSe23tc2ew

I’ve gathered some stats that were as accurate as I could get earlier today around 12:30 and probably don’t begin to measure the total impact of the campaign, as they don’t even begin to measure the blog posts and Facebook shares, etc. of the videos.

149 ‘response’ videos thus far and it’s probably more than that by the time I finish writing, for a combined 3,347,742 views. The average video has been viewed 22,468 times.

Tweets @oldspice in the past two days are at 12,066, and he’s getting responses on Facebook, YouTube, etc, also. (That number grew by 30 in less than one minute).

New videos are getting about 130 views within minutes. Within 20-30 minutes, they average around 300 views. Overnight, viewing numbers explode as blogs pick up their favorite videos and they are passed around virally.

So far, the campaign has: Endorsed libraries, facilitated a marriage proposal, responded to many articles from outlets like: Huffington Post, LA Times, Perez Hilton, 4Chan(!) and G4 TV, responded to celebrities and online personalities such as: Ellen Degeneres, Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Biz and Ev, Kevin Rose, Guy Kawasaki, Ryan Seacrest, and carried on an ‘online fliration’ with Alyssa Milano. Oh, and they responded to the official Starbucks twitter account, getting in on the action.

I went to my old university the yesterday to see a friend and when I arrived they had been watching these videos for awhile. This is a huge success story for Old Spice in updating their brand from the previous perception as an ‘old person’ brand. (College-aged friend’s words, not mine.)

Some film posters might soon have more to offer than graphics and titles.

Disney created the first augmented reality campaign for a major motion picture to promote the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. If users launch Layar, an augmented reality app available for iPhone and Android, near a specially-marked poster for the movie, they’ll be presented with a character from the film. The character prompts them to watch the trailer and offers the opportunity to play a short game.

If users answer three questions correctly, they are awarded points at Movie Minutes, a website that offers movie-related merchandise and DVDs. The campaign is taking place exclusively in the Netherlands right now, targeting users in close proximity to movie theaters.

Major brands are taking notice of the unique opportunities that augmented reality provides and finding creative ways to use the technology. Expect to see more of the same soon, in a theater near you.

Originally posted at Speaking of Social Media.

Seven hundred million questions, 12 million accounts, and the 61st most visited site in the US (according to Quantcast), one site that is growing in popularity has provided a new way to communicate directly online. A more stealth trend among younger ‘netizens’ is an anonymous questioning platform provided by a service called Formspring.me.

Formspring features a simple to set up to create an account and link it to social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Anonymous users can ask questions of whoever has set up a Formspring page, and the question-ee can choose to respond and make public any submitted questions. While teenagers are using it to ask risqué questions of their peers, some brands have been able to capture the direct-response appeal of the platform to answer their customers’ questions.

Far from a customer-complaint forum, Formspring’s user culture of anonymous Q&A provides an opportunity to answer questions in a casual way. The users are mostly unidentified, and the answers tend to reflect a sense of humor or personalization behind the brand face. Fiat in Brazil set up a page for the launch of the Uno, and Red Bull US is using the service to answer questions that range from the mundane, “What was the happiest moment in your life?” to the more combative “Why are you **** riding the Celtics so hard?” with a flair and personality of its own (“Have you heard of a Red Bull athlete named Rajon http://redbullusa.com/rondo? Our turn: Are you a Lakers fan, or something? =) See also http://j.mp/LooseBall — next Q!”)

Authenticity is a keystone for brands engaging in social media.It takes a strong stomach to solicit anonymous questions, but for the brand that’s willing to take the risk, the payoff is increased credibility.

Article originally posted at Speaking of Social Media.

The most followed accounts are generally those of media outlets and especially celebrities. In perhaps the most unsurprising study yet released, Sysomos has done a study of followers’ influence based on retweets and follower quality, and found that celebrities’ followers have the least influence.

Because celebrities’ followers are inherently listeners, rather than authorities or influencers, they do not have the same value as followers of the New York Times or other media outlets. Sysomos identified rankings of “follower authority,” defined as those who are more apt to comment or make their own judgments on current events and share those opinions, via retweet or reblogging.

The quest for followers does have some use in validating the newsworthiness of the information from a particular twitter account, but chasing follower numbers alone is a poor metric of performance when using social media. Pay attention to the quality of followers you attract as well as the number to spread your message online.

Find more information on this study at Mashable.

Originally posted at Speaking of Social Media.

We’ve covered Stickybits before, a startup launched at SXSW earlier this year with the intent of creating a platform for discussion of physical objects. Today’s announcement of Pepsi as an official partner is a peek into the future of physical objects that mirror the digital world, and vice-versa. A cousin to augmented reality, Stickybits provides a way for customers and brands to discuss real-world objects, by scanning barcodes and sharing stories, comments, photos, and video that have to do with those brands.

Pepsi’s sponsorship means that they will have the first message to users, similar to a paid search result, on any of their products that a customer might scan. While it may be a while until mass adoption of scanning objects takes place, similar behavior such as checking into places via Foursquare and competitors has already begun to seep into the mainstream. Barcodes are available for anything via Stickybits – the picture at the beginning of this post is one we’ve created for GolinHarris.

The internet has long strived to become a place that interacts and provides useful information about the real world, from RFID technology to Google Maps’ Street View. The object-oriented internet has taken a huge leap forward today in a platform that provides information about brands and products via mobile phones.

As new platforms that merge the digital space with reality emerge, so do both opportunities and threats to brand discussion. Although Pepsi has taken a bold leap forward by proactively joining the conversation about real-world objects tied to the digital space, it is easy to see that this kind of digital and physical interactions has the potential to be both positive and explosively negative for all kinds of brands. How long until health organizations are attaching photo media of the morbidly obese to brands such as Pepsi that contribute greatly to the obesity epidemic taking place in America?

While Stickybits may only be an iteration in an object-oriented internet, the message is clear: discussion of brands can and will take place everywhere a product exists in the real world.

This article originally posted at Speaking of Social Media.

The increasing connectivity to the internet via smart phones has given rise to another always-on technology: location-based services. Juniper Research’s newest report on mobile services estimates that mobile location-based services may reach revenues of $12.7 billion by 2014.

The most popular location-based services of the future will be timely, rewarding and useful. In a study by eMarketer, 88% of female internet users would be interested in targeted offers from brands they trust. Discounts and coupons are already popular on smart phones, and Foursquare has made their business out of offering “Mayors” special deals. Cellfire also offers on-the-spot coupons to customers. Location-based services are an opportunity to match brands and customers based on their proximity to points of sale.

Location-based services also serve other, more utilitarian needs. Yelp offers restaurant and store information for nearby stores, while Sit or Squat offers restroom reviews. Happy Hours will find the closest happy hour for after-work revelry, and Rocket Taxi will find a nearby taxi to take you home after.

Other location-based services, such as Whrrl and Twitter‘s location feature, offer the opportunity to provide locational context to sharing information such as photos and status updates. These services might create digital communities of those who regularly visit the same real-world locations.

The ubiquity and utility of always-on devices ensure that location-based services continue to grow in adoption. Although privacy concerns will be prominent, the experience that providers will offer and augmented reality apps such as Layar will provide an even more seamless experience hard to resist.

Article originally posted at Speaking of Social Media.

How much does traditional news media still matter? A recent report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that more than 99% news stories in blogs linked to outlets such as broadcast networks and newspapers. BBC, CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post were responsible for 80% of all blogged links.

The Pew study gathered a year of data on top stories discussed on blogs and social media, and seven months’ of data on Twitter. The report outlines the major differences and similarities between social media and the traditional press.

As expected, the report found that social media moves quickly and focuses on breaking news. The attention spans of consumers were short, and major news stories were usually off the top stories list by the third day. In the mainstream press, 50% of top stories are still news the next week.

The agendas of each platform varied significantly. Researchers found that the lead story of mainstream news and blogs were the same at most, 13 of the 49 weeks studied. Other outlets such as Twitter, shared the same lead stories in just four of the same weeks.

Most original reporting is still being done by mainstream news outlets and journalists, but the agendas of discussion are being shaped online. The traditional media provides a platform upon which social media builds and diverges, and the crowds are creating a new consumption model that will ultimately shape the kinds of news that is reported.

Visit the Pew Research Center for more information on the study.

Article originally posted at Speaking of Social Media.

As Facebook’s numbers continue to grow, a huge shift in the site’s demographics is underway. According to StrategyLabs,  who have archived data provided by Facebook through it’s self-serve ad system since 2007, the six months from January 2009 to June 2009 saw the addition of almost 5 million new users aged 55 and over.

The rapid growth of the platform may have led some of the first supporters of the site, college and high school students, to abandon it for greener (and younger) pastures. The newest data available shows that self-identified high school and college students’ numbers have dropped by 16% and 21%, respectively, and growth for the 18-24 segments have slowed to a trickle of 4.8%, compared to the rapid expansion of the 55+ segment, growing at an astounding rate of 513% over the same 6 months. Some marketers might be left wondering where all the kids have gone.

Facebook boasts 71 million US users, and continues to grow in every age demographic. The 18-24 set still accounts for 25.1% of all users on the service. However, only six months before that, it was 40.8% of all users. Some caveats are that Facebook’s numbers are rough, and there exists some possibility of fewer users self-reporting their school affiliations or that a saturation point has been reached for younger users.

However, it is more likely that the aging trend will continue, and the audience of Facebook will grow progressively older. This presents new challenges, but new opportunities as well, to appeal to an increasingly tech-savvy and more sophisticated older consumer.

Read more from ReadWriteWeb.

Originally posted at Speaking of Social Media.

It’s a picture that has become a staple of online social networking. The self-portrait-in-a-mirror cell phone camera picture adorns Facebook and Myspace pages of young people almost everywhere.

Recognizing the opportunity that the ubiquitous “mirror shot” presented, Diesel Spain installed booths in their dressing room areas. The touchscreen boxes let shoppers take pictures of themselves in their Diesel clothes and post them on Facebook, getting instant feedback on their styles from Facebook friends. The picture includes a Diesel logo in the corner, so it’s clear where these clothes are from.

While most businesses are trying to figure out how to drive traffic to their Facebook pages, Diesel has taken another approach and brought Facebook into their store locations. Have you heard of another clever use of Facebook in a retail space?

Facebook isn’t the only place Diesel has engaged customers online. A one-day event at their flagship New York store offered special prints of tee-shirts to customers who checked into Foursquare within a three-block radius. The campaign netted 44 check-ins and 17 tweets. It was a low-key introduction to Foursquare’s capabilities for the brand, and eschewed some of the common tactics used, such as special badges or a longer duration.

Check out the video of the Facebook box:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P-zA90yI64

Read more from All Facebook, or check out Mashable’s writeup of Diesel’s other social media campaigns.

Originally posted at Speaking of Social Media.

Twitter’s “Promoted Tweets” ad platform has launched with a high-profile  partner in Virgin Airlines.

Twitter selected a few partners and approached them about advertising opportunities during the first phase of rollout for the new promotion platform. Among them, Virgin Airlines has a reputation for social-media and internet savvy that made them a good prospect as an initial partner.

The promotion for Virgin is highly focused on drawing the attention of consumers who would appreciate the unique features of Virgin, such as in-flight WiFi. In a move that Virgin America’s VP of Marketing described as not wishing to disrupt the follower relationship, the promoted tweets are linked to very specific and non-obvious keywords. The tweets are difficult to find for most, and consistent with the company’s pre-existing channels.

Virgin is promoting customer-to-customer interaction with a few discount codes, but mostly, to encourage tweeters to share what they are watching in-flight on the company’s entertainment system, and share pictures of “geek moments” in air.

While few details about the Promoted Tweets platform are available, Virgin is setting a tone for how the service should be used. High-quality, low-spam interactions specific to how users use an individual brand and engaging with customers individually will generate the kind of respect in online communities that people expect from friends, and now, through Twitter, brands as well.

Learn more about the Virgin/Twitter partnership at Mashable, or an overview of promoted tweets by Alan Parker.

Originally posted at Speaking Of Social Media.