Because its Thursday and my brain is work-product mush. Enjoy:
SXSW PanelPicker! Poked, Liked & Re-Tweeted: A Google Love Story
Hey all, I have a panel submission up for the 2011 SXSW Interactive PanelPicker….Details of the panel below, would much appreciate a vote for it and would love to hear feedback / questions you would want to see answered / addressed should the panel get picked for SXSW!
Click here to vote….hugs!
Title: Poked, Liked & Re-Tweeted: A Google Love Story
Organizer : Alisa Leonard, iCrossing
Description
For too long SEO and social pundits have battled it out – “social media creates links and visibility in search!” …..”social is about conversation and engagement, screw search!” Will there ever be a true synergy between these two? The engines certainly think so and now more than ever search really does need social and social impacts search more than ever. How? Why? How do you do it, and do it right, without violating the tenants of engagement and the almighty Conversation? Alisa Leonard and Rob Garner of iCrossing present a compelling narrative and case studies that illustrate just how the long awaited synergy between search and social is real and how it can be leveraged to drive performance and results. For real this time, we promise.
Questions Answered
- How has search changed and why does it matter?
- Why does social matters for search more than ever?
- How do you actually use social to impact search — beyond spreading links?
- What’s an example of how you measure success? (Billboard case study)
- What changes are coming that creators need to be prepared for?
Level Intermediate
Category Social Networking
Tags integrated campaigns, search media
Type Panel
Event Interactive 2011
Touche: BYU Takes Cue from @OldSpice
Of all the copycats I expected post the @OldSpice hub bub, my alma mater, Brigham Young University, was perhaps the last brand I expected to get in on the meme game. For any of you who might be familiar with BYU’s uber conservative culture, it might be a bit of a surprise, but I have to say well done indeed, copycats 
OMG Old Spice
Did you hear that? Another explosion somewhere out on the interwebs has happened, and this one smells like Old Spice. Yesterday Old Spice launched, quite innocuously, a campaign that has now reached veritable meme status. Yesterday this message appeared quite innocently on the Old Spice Twitter feed:
“Today could be just like the other 364 days you log into twitter,” it read. “Or maybe the Old Spice man shows up.”
What happened next is internet viral gold. Immediately the Old Spice Man, Isaiah Mustafa, began fielding questions from Twitter, Reddit, Yahoo Answers, YouTube, etc, the replies to which were short, pithy video responses created on the fly. The clincher was that of the 115 videos produced, many of them were responses to media, digital influencers and celebrities alike. Major news media, Twitter, the blogosphere, and your inbox are all a flurry with buzz about this campaign. It worked. They got us all talking (and maybe even buying).
It has long been a mantra of the web and digital advertising that “content is king.” Many of the accolades showered on this Old Spice campaign has been directed towards the content itself, and how engaging and awesome it is. How it is engaging influencers in real-time.
Now while the content itself is great– let us not underestimate the mechanism by which this great content could be surfaced, engaged with and cared about.
The success of this effort is predicated on good old fashioned Influencer Marketing. Human to human interaction. Talking. There isn’t just a creative content strategy at play here, there is a creative influencer outreach and conversation management strategy at play here. Word-of-mouth, engagement, influence. Too often these words get lost or diluted from constant punditry. But the reality is that this campaign worked because not only was great content created, but there was conscious focus and planning around fostering real-time, human dialogue through targeted outreach and community management. It is the dialogue which has now constructed a brand experience that the brand alone could never have created on its own. It highlights a new way of thinking about brand experience, pointing towards a need for live experiences and real-time marketing. The challenge of course, and the litmus for when it is done well, is that “real time marketing” shouldn’t look or act like marketing at all. Rather, it feels human, it feels participatory, it is driven by conversation.
Also, this is just brilliant….and true. This is the exact formula we use too:
It’s Here