Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much!
In the Battle for the Hearts & Minds of
Social Media Addicts…
VERSUS 
There can be only one Social Media Blockbuster — You decide!
Glen Gilmore
@Trendtracker
* Photo credits: Flickr: Zuckerberg by Carlo Nicora; Dorsey by David Shankbone
If you haven’t followed the Old Spice phenomenon from this week, you’ve missed out. It’s a great example of a really strong performing viral campaign that harkens back to some of the classics like Subservient Chicken, Shave Everywhere, and Tea Partay.
It started on on television earlier this year with the following Old Spice commercial, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” (link for those of you in RSS readers):
(If you’d like to see how this was accomplished, Leo Laporte has a great interview with the agency.)
That commercial, first aired during the Super Bowl in early February, as of this week has garnered over 14 million views. And then the next commercial, “Old Spice: Questions“, went up on YouTube:
Those ads are pretty funny to begin with and were passed around a good deal. But this week, Wieden + Kennedy, creators of the campaign for Procter & Gamble, took it to the next level.
A business colleague asked me this question and I figured if it was on his mind, it might be on yours too. While it remains to be seen if I have actual influence anywhere, I have undoubtedly created substantial, tangible business benefits through Twitter and the social web. So here’s my strategy. It’s very simple and I think it could probably work for anybody.
When I first started using Twitter, I made a big – yet common – mistake. I followed only people who followed me. This resulted in a stream full of spam and total silence whenever I posed a question or shared a link.
When I reached about 1,000 followers, I decided to take a proactive approach to Twitter. I began to seek and follow people in my industry – people who care about the same topics I care about. Once this happened, I generated some great opportunities through the social networking platform.
Over the past couple of months as we’ve been working with clients at Make Good Media, we noticed a social media trend I thought I would share. It has to do with Twitter. As an active, daily user of Twitter, it is fairly easy to overlook this trend. But repeatedly, we’ve heard the following, “At first, Twitter is really hard to understand, quite confusing, and frankly I don’t get it.” Some have even gone so far as to say, “I’m ready to give up.”
Now as someone who is very active on Twitter, and knows all the ins and outs, this can come as a quite a surprise. It’s not until you sit down with someone, begin going through it, and say statements like, “That’s a DM.” Or “You see this, that is a ‘mention.’ To reply to that, you just type in the at symbol followed by their username.” Pretty quickly you realize you are almost speaking a foreign language, and there are several things that need to be learned for someone to really grasp the basics of Twitter.
Eric Fletcher posted a tweet saying, “World traveller @treypennington…” At first, I was a tad embarrassed, then I embraced his reference. This IS an incredible time and I am grateful for the amazing adventure life is. I’m even more thankful for the fuel powering this adventure.
No doubt most of us think of places when we hear “world traveler,” as in Big Ben or the London Eye in London or the Eiffel Tower, River Senn, or Notre Dame in Paris. All are fantastic places and places I’ve been able to see this year. Still, there’s something else that makes those places so memorable…
London is a romantic, history-rich place with ample venues for catching up with Gemma, Caroline, Luke, Dickie, Eric, Drew, Gabrielle and many other friends. Paris is home to Loic, Thibault, Maxim, and Michelle. Devon is home territory for Scott, Andrew, John, and a whole host of people who are friends.
My journeys abroad take me face-to-face with friends—friends I met and got to know first on social media (primarily Twitter). The fuel for my “world travels” is the people of social media.
Social media opens doors to new friends all over the place. To experience the true hidden treasure in social media, it’s vital to take advantage of opportunities to get face-to-face. Social media can fuel the initial connections and the ongoing connections; face-to-face adds immeasurable richness to the experience.
Social media not only opens the doors to new friends, it also paves the road to opportunities usually limited to folks called celebrities. For instance, because of connections and interactions facilitated by social media, I’ll spend time with Seth Godin in New York and with Zig Ziglar in Orlando…all this month and then again with Chris Brogan in Memphis next month.
Why am I sharing this with you? Because I’m a celebrity or an important person? Hardly. The point is, I’m an average person who’s having an extraordinary experience because of new friends all around the world. The tools that connected me with those friends are readily available to you. That means you have what you need to discover the open doors to whatever adventure you want.
Those of us who enjoy what can be accomplished through social media often spend a lot of time actually talking about the media. The media is fascinating. The adventure begins, though, not with the media, but with people it connects you with.
My adventure, and joy in life, is finding new friends, being with them long enough to catch a vision of their hidden treasure, help them see it and then encourage them and help them grasp it to do something.
Your adventure is probably something entirely different. You, for instance, may want to get people to consume resources with minimal impact on the environment: there are brilliant people doing unbelievably cool things around your adventure…they just probably aren’t hanging out at your local coffee shop or pub. They probably are hanging out online…and sharing what they’re learning (check out what Norway is doing about storing the CO2 deep under the sea, for instance).
Whatever your dream adventure is, there are probably whole communities of people already gathering online to talk about it. Why not jump in online and watch for your opportunity to get face-to-face with them?
Trey Pennington