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 
Category Archives: Social Media
Touche: BYU Takes Cue from @OldSpice
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:
the real life social network
nothing particularly new here (been saying this for a several years now), but well thought out and stated with clarity. remember folks, the web is social
The Real Life Social Network v2
View more documents from Paul Adams.
Ambient Data & Techno-Cognitive Modalities of the FUTURE
I love the future. I love thinking about it, hypothesizing about it, bemoaning it and awaiting its arrival. It elicits visions of hoverboards (seriously, WHY aren’t they here by now!), jetpacks, silver jumpsuits and of course, a world of dynamically responsive objects based on ambient identity data, right?
“The future is NOW” may be a well-worn axiom of hackneyed corporate wisdom, but I’m into it and drinking the kool-aid like a high schooler on a bender. Today’s post is an ode to musing about the FUTURE. Get into it.
We’ve talked a lot here on TWIS about things like oh, you know, Synaptic Web, Pragmatic Web, data ubiquity, and other equally name-droppy concepts. But what exactly does all this mumbo-jumbo mean? To put it in CEO terms, how the hell does something like “the synaptic web,” interoperable data and an “internet of things” impact my business? What does it look like, what does it do?
Well, thankfully, the master curators over at Infosthetics found conceptual photographic mockups of what an “internet of things”– a world of networked objects and places, connected to a synaptic web, begetting dynamic, pragmatic “user” experiences might be like…or at least look like. Sure, its all pie in the sky (or is it?)
Tempur-Pedic: How a Social Brand Should Behave
So I am in the market for a new mattress. I hate buying mattresses, it is probably one of the worst consumer experiences….you never know what to look for, you’re always feeling like you’re being taken for a ride, the mattress world is confusing with brands changing model names for different retailers thus making the decision process confusing and difficult to price-compare, etc…its an awful researching process.
So like any good director of social media, part of my research online involves looking on the different brand’s FB pages to see what commenters are saying. I have been considering a Tempur-Pedic due to chronic back pain– and old remnant from my life as a competitive gymnast for 12 years. I know people have their opinions about memory foam mattresses– some swear by them and some cannot stand them. However you may feel about their mattresses, as a brand Tempur-Pedic demonstrates several positive traits: honesty, openness and straightforwardness. They demonstrated this recently on their Facebook Page.
Their response to a consumer on Facebook is a PERFECT example of how a brand should respond / behave when faced with negative (but HONEST) feedback from a consumer — someone who isn’t pissed off but is simply offering their honest feedback to another consumer’s question. This is a great example to brands who may be nervous about entering the space and dealing with “negative” feedback. Firstly, you ARE going to get negative feedback. And that is OK. Tempur-Pedic turned this negative comment into a positive brand touch point, and therefore has significantly influenced my perception of them. Instead of reading this comment and deciding its not for me, their response has encouraged me to continue to consider a Tempur-Pedic mattress.
Tempur-Pedic’s response is perfect because:
1. Tempur-Pedic actually responds and doesn’t ignore this feedback (as many brands on their FB pages do)
2. They acknowledge that her problem is legitimate and that others experience it too
3. They suggest that there is a remedy and that they would like to help
4. They publicly let her know that they will be messaging her privately to try and resolve the issue
Keep in mind too that Tempur-Pedic has a “Connect & Share” feature on their dot com, allowing customers to find answers to questions from other consumers, share stories and feedback. They also have a presence on YouTube and Twitter. Well done with their social media execution, but most importantly well done for behaving as a socialized brand should! Many brands think that because they have nicely creative branded social spaces that they are doing their job– nay. It is all about the proper mechanics of true community management, of which Tempur-Pedic is a great example and case study for just how important a proper communications and governance strategy within social media really is.
The Synaptic Web
Some of you might recall a post I wrote for ReadWriteWeb not too long ago on the Pragmatic Web. The term “pragmatic” is specifically used due to its definition within semiotics:
“Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. It studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only on the linguistic knowledge (e.g. grammar, lexicon etc.) of the speaker and listener, but also on the context of the utterance, knowledge about the status of those involved, the inferred intent of the speaker, and so on”
Essentially, the Pragmatic Web theory states that the web will become increasingly more useful, usable and dynamically relevant to users based on their identities and the context of their social graph. To clarify, “identity” in this context refers specifically to three kinds of social identity data: explicit (what I say about myself), behavioral (what I do, my activities) and relationship (who I am connected to and what those connections say about me).
The Synaptic Web, a theory constructed by my brilliant friend Chris Saad, expands upon the “simplicity” of the Pragmatic Web theory by abstracting what this contextual relevance is based on. Instead of merely looking at people and their connections, Synaptic Web looks at the totality of data objects, their connections, the meaning which can be derived from these connections, and how these meanings may be applied to create a more “useful, usable and dynamically relevant” web:
“We believe that this evolving view of neural science provides an increasingly apt metaphor for what we call the ‘Synaptic Web’ in that the connections between objects are more important than the objects themselves. The question is; how are these connections changing to create new experiences? In other words, there is an opportunity to stop looking at the nodes and start looking at the space between them.
The exploding variety, speed and flexibility of electronic connections – those between people, data sets, applications, the real world and the online world, gestures and meaning and content and communication – is at the root of what some have called an evolving “collective intelligence.” Thus, the Synaptic Web is about the evolution of the Internet from document delivery platform, to a platform for communication (“2.0″) and now towards something much more profound: a dynamic web of adaptive “organic” and implicit connections whereby real-time information flows give structure and meaning to previously unconnected sets of data. The Internet is a sea of conversations streaming through connections, and these patterns have meaning.”
In many ways the idea of the Pragmatic Web is merely one result of the larger, more encompassing goal of a Synaptic Web. I mentioned to Chris via Twitter that perhaps it may be said that the Synaptic Web begets a Pragmatic Web.
During SXSWi, Intel sponsored a summit in conjunction with the Social Media Club for a discussion about the Synaptic Web:
TBL: The Year Open Data Went Worldwide
I love everything about this. #Dataportability