A lot of ink has already been written about why Old Spice owned the Internet last week, and I don’t want to rehash the various aspects that RWW has covered, and Dave Stubbs has mentioned, among others, but what I feel is missing from the conversation is how it all started. My friend Leigh Himel deconstructed what the brief could have looked like, and I think it’s worth expanding on to describe how the campaign set the foundation for success.

It all started with the insight and a deep understanding of the market and the consumer.

The objective, as Leigh rightly points out, was to re-position and re-invigorate the brand.  To do this the team needed to understand the competitive landscape, the perspective consumers had of the brand, and the territory they had to play in. The market was saturated with female unfriendly AXE advertising, and as women are the primary consumers for male scent gifts, turning that into an advantage would have been mandatory for Old Spice.

With that as the starting point the Old Spice team (with a receptive client) decided to do the obvious: appeal to women without alienating men.

Old Spice cast the perfect actor for the new positioning. A former NFL player, a nice guy, and someone who wasn’t so perfect that men would feel threatened. Genius casting. Based on, I imagine, a perfect casting brief.

The next step was to create a seriously funny commercial that turned all the cliche’s of advertising and film on their heads. “Look at your man, now back at me”. “It’s now diamonds”. “I’m on a horse”. They made a commercial that was frankly better than 90% of the TV shows it appeared alongside. I first heard of it because my partner was watching TV and told me I had to see it. So what did I do? I went to YouTube and there it was. Word of mouth at it’s finest, but it would have been dead in the water if the team hadn’t thought to seed it online first.

They let that roll and roll it did. Everyone who saw the commercial started sharing it, and a character was born.

Now what to do with the follow up? The character was a success both online and offline and while they could continue to let it ride as a TV spot, the proof was there that they could take advantage of how much the spot resonated with the folks online.

The plan was to create a new TV spot, let that simmer for a bit and then pounce. The social media marketers did their homework and decided what the right outlets were to start spreading the character. The fact they took on 4Chan and won speaks volumes about how integrated and on the ball they were. While everyone talks about how they took over Twitter in a day, they really started seeding the campaign before that. They laid the groundwork. And it paid off. Big time.

It came on my radar with @jakrose tweeting that he’d received a video reply early Tuesday morning. “Fry it up and eat it down JakRose. Fry it up and eat it down.” The network effect took over and for the next two days it was all I cared about that was happening online. The social team did a brilliant job monitoring responses and working with the creatives to write compelling copy. They didn’t just target celebrities and “influencers” but responded to comments, Diggs, tweets and blog posts that they felt fit with the character as a whole. They were obviously fully immersed in the language and cadence of the social web because their video responses contained references only a geek would love (or get). They respected all the unwritten rules of the culture and tailored their responses to match the brand, and the mediums they were using.

They embraced the mash-ups and promoted them. They let the community roll with it. They poked fun at themselves (Old Spice responding to @isiahmustafa) And they set a time limit. Any longer than 2 days and it would have become tired. Any shorter and it would have been disappointing. The mash-ups continue to roll in, with the most recent being Mel Gibson calling the Old Spice Guy.

It was brilliance that came from the initial insights and work they did a couple of years ago. And deep understanding of how the social web works.

The challenge will be what they do next and if it moves the needle at the top of the purchase funnel (awareness & consideration). But I have faith, and am looking forward to every moment of it!

What makes Facebook so successful as our new “portal”?

In my view it’s that it’s not actually a portal at all, it’s a hub.

It’s not a means to capturing the Internet in one place, it’s about capturing your friends in one place. It’s about the connections that make up the threads of our digital life – our events, photos, contact information, birthdays, interests, entertainment, all as a personalized experience that we can expand or limit as we see fit. Facebook will continue to grow as more of our social lives move online, and migrating people away from the system where we have invested years of time and content will prove increasingly difficult for web properties that don’t tie-in with our existing networks.

What’s the missing link (so far) in tying our networks together?

A personal CRM and curation system. The ability to tag, categorize, link, promote/ demote, and import from various social systems to truly personalize the relevance of our contacts and their content together. We’ll need more signal than noise to be able to keep up.

While things will continue to happen in real-time on the web, human evolution does not happen in real-time and being able to manage our ever growing connections and interests without separating or limiting our profiles will be mandatory.

Will Facebook do it, or will a new start-up, or traditional media company, take the reins and migrate people away from the walled garden into a new hub?

(h/t Mitch Joel)

He asked what, as a community, we could do to assemble quality data on the Digital Media industry in Toronto? There is currently no good accounting of how many companies exist in Toronto or how many people work in the field or what value we are adding to the economy.

He cited A List Apart’s survey as an example of the type of information we require.

Why is this important?
So first off why would we bother trying to assemble this data?

For one, we need to understand what impact we have on this city’s and province’s economy. While we may have been a cottage industry in the past we are a legitimate industry now. We create jobs, we support local landlords, local suppliers like ISPs and computer retailers, we need to quantify this.

There is currently no good information on this. StatsCan data is terrible and trying to get the government to collect it will take forever.

If we are able to quantify this, we can begin to have a voice in shaping policy on issues like Net Neutrality, HST and other issues that affect us as an industry.

Once we know how large we are and what we are comprised of we can begin to align together. One of the mandates of Digital Media Camp was to identify “How can we work together to propel Toronto’s technology, content and design communities into the future and make Toronto a globally competitive hub of digital media entrepreneurship and innovation?” Arguably this is impossible without being able to actually identify who the community is.

What are the barriers?
The most obvious barrier to me is how we self identify in this community. For example, is someone at IBM in the same industry as someone at a 3 person open source based dev shop? We may not identify cleanly with each other. I know whenever I have to pick from a list of StatsCan industries I can never figure out where to put us. Are we marketing, are we technology are we content? This is a big issue that needs to be defined.

DigitalMediacamp defines us as…

Digital Media is most simply defined as any information that is created and shared virtually, rather than physically. It has growing applications in all industries, including:

- entertainment – film, TV, games, visual effects
- healthcare – diagnostic imaging, collaborative care, health IT
- education – immersive learning environments
- finance and insurance – modeling complex data sets
- minerals and mining – seismic exploration

Uhm, not sure about this definition as it is extremely broad and our company would not fit cleanly in those examples. Some work definitely needs to be done on this issue.

Next steps
I slipped out before the end of the session on Sat but I’ve heard there is an action item which is to continue this discussion on Jan 18th in Toronto. There will be info forthcoming.

I believe this is an important issue that we need to take care of as a grass roots initiative. It is up to us to stand up and be counted.

As a fan of Vimeo’s, I was stoked to hear that Blake Whitman would be giving a talk at FOWD in NY. (You may recognize Blake from that time he had some questions about the homepage…) Blake’s presentation showed that cultivating a vibrant community online is, in no small part, a tractable design problem.

Let me explain what I mean by that.

Vimeo stands out to me because I think they’ve done a great job of embodying simplicity on the web. And it turns out that this is a by-product of thinking about their site in a really focused way. First and foremost, Blake explained that Vimeo is NOT a video site: it’s a community for creative folks who like to make and watch videos. So all of the design decisions are built around this core identity.

I’d argue that understanding the team behind Vimeo’s design decisions can help us bust some popular implicit myths about building online communities:

Myth 1. Online communities are like the wild-west: they work best when uninhibited by constraints.

It’s tempting to think that there’s very little mechanical or social control we can or ought to exert when it comes to building online community. After all, members need to feel like this is their space and we wouldn’t want to stifle engagement–especially early on. Vimeo’s approach challenges this notion.

Blake explained that designing for a specific type of user and imposing key limitations have made their online community flourish, not flounder.

For example, unlike YouTube, Vimeo constrains the type of videos you can upload. Another example: rather than deploying the standard designer’s toolbox for building community around content (e.g. ratings and reviews), Vimeo only lets members formally designate videos they “like.” Blake was pretty adamant: “Vimeo is not a popularity contest.” This makes sense when you think about it since two traits of a strong community—online or otherwise—are 1) shared identity, and 2) a sense of belonging. If other people in the “community” are trash-talking something you’ve created and contributed, both of these traits are strongly diminished.

Myth 2. Successful online communities require strong and deliberate social engineering

This myth swings the pendulum all the way to the other extreme. Clients often default into this line of thinking as a way of hedging their bets. Above all, they want to manage and mitigate potential risks associated with an open online community.

Vimeo demonstrates the promise of a much simpler approach: get involved and lead by example.

Vimeo hires community positions out of their actual community. Their staff are very active on the site: they engage with other members, are supportive where they can be, they make and post their own videos. The upshot of all this is that the team has a vested interest and and embedded perspective—they’re effectively designing their own community space.

To wrap it all up, Blake’s talk encouraged me to think about the cultivation of online community as a a multi-disciplinary undertaking, but assuredly one where design plays an important role.

To keep the conversation going, what are some other design principles that can be applied to these sorts of online environments?