Ever since the Old Spice commercials debuted with … well, the guy they have given no name to … have debuted, the Internet has loved them, sharing them across various sites, and talking about how funny they were.  Well, yesterday the company decided to really embrace this Internet popularity by bring in the actor to do over 100 mini-commercials it published on YouTube where he responded to people all over the Web talking about him.  What they ended up was a real-time viral phenomenon the likes of which no one has seen before.

old spice guyThe situation was that Old Spice was reading Twitter messages, YouTube, Yahoo Answers and other places and spent the day making personalized videos with the actor from the commercials and posting them on YouTube on their account.  I can't even imagine the logistics of this day as they pulled out numerous props relating to what they were saying, and got out over 100 of the videos in the span of  a day.  Considering they had to be scripted, edited, processed for uploading and so on, they had to be working at a breakneck speed to pull this off.

Whatever this day cost them, it was worth every cent they spent.

While the majority of videos were directed at average users, targeting people such as Kevin Rose, Perez Hilton, Ashton Kutcher and so on, even including a wedding proposal,  all of whom shared out the videos upon their completion, Old Spice got so much targeted advertising that I'm not sure it can even be calculated.

Old Spice hit the ball out of the park with this promotion where so many other companies have failed.  Company after company has attempted to use social media to promote themselves, and where I think Old Spice got it right was they included people immediately in the promotion.  There was no clicking buttons, pasting links, jumping through hoops, you simply posted a message and waited in hopes that your's was one of the ones chosen.  They had everyone talking about them all day, the press was writing about them and they got a ton of word-of-mouth.  I figure this project cost them under $1 million, and it was probably the best money the company has ever spent.

The problem now is that other companies will try to copy this, and if they aren't careful, it will fail miserably.  Even if Old Spice tries to do it again it won't work as well, but Tuesday, July 13th, can be remembered as the day a company finally got social media marketing right.

… Monocle smile.

What say you?  Did you enjoy the Old Spice take on social media marketing?