I decided to put our proprietary influence-ranking system to the test this week by looking at the now-legendary Old Spice campaign, which produced over 180 short video responses on YouTube in just two days and was spread all over the Internet.
These conditions are factored into our influence algorithm and then measured against the other results in the study.
Inbound links – This is the number-one ingredient in Spiral16′s influence ranking. The more inbound links, the more influential a URL is deemed.
Domain influence – We measure the number of times specific domains appear in your relevant results.
Age and Persistence – Newer posts will generally have more recent links, however, an older URL that continues to be linked is more influential.
Search source abundance – Even though duplicate URLs will be rejected, this relates to how many internal sources returned the URL as a result. The more search sources that find the URL, the higher influence it has because its more likely to be seen by someone searching for the topic.
Position – This is based on a URL’s average position in search rankings and also takes into consideration any change in position.
1. The Man Your Man Could Smell Like
This is the Super Bowl commercial that introduced the character back in February. As of this writing, it has almost 14 million YouTube views. 2% of all the URLs relevant to this campaign link to this YouTube video. This video was a good jumping off point for people to talk about this character.
Comments: 18,318
Favorites: 113,121
Likes: 57,855
Dislikes: 923
This is a 3D visual map of the URLs relevant to the Old Spice Man campaign. The YouTube channel is in the center of the screen. Click to enlarge.
2. Questions
At over 7 million views since June 29 when it debuted on YouTube, this video is just plain funny, and it was strategically designed to get people talking about the Old Spice Man again before they launched their social media campaign. 1.93% of all URLs link to this video. Considering its been up for less than 3 weeks, that’s pretty impressive.
Comments: 9,300
Favorites: 33,930
Likes: 34,697
Dislikes: 440
3. @jsbeals, The Marriage Proposal
A Twitter user asked the Old Spice Man to ask his girlfriend to marry him and the writers jumped on it–smart move. It’s at 460,000 views, was linked to by 1.01% of all relevant URLs, and is the most influential response video of the bunch, just barely beating out …
Comments: 639
Favorites: 1,397
Likes: 2,954
Dislikes: 28
This is the infamous and perfectly calibrated 4Chan response. It has over 600,00 views and speaks to a very specific audience. Many users may not completely understand the cranky and anonymous group, but they are powerful influencers and this video plays to their absurdist sense of humor. It may have been watched and commented on more times than the marriage proposal, but only .094% of URLs in the study link to this video.
Comments: 3,276
Favorites: 5,297
Likes: 6,738
Dislikes: 137
At nearly 450,000 views, this video is widely considered to be the video that kicked off the social media explosion. The founder of Digg wasn’t feeling good so he tweeted the Old Spice Man, who responded with this video. Rose’s response to his personalized message immediately went out to the over 1 million people who follow him on Twitter: “”Holy sh*t, best get well video EVER from Old Spice.” .06% of all URLs in the study link to this video.
Comments: 486
Favorites: 800
Likes: 2,066
Dislikes: 39
A very clever meta video with 140,000 views where the Old Spice Man talks directly to a tired Isaiah Mustafa, the actor who plays him, and tells him to stay on target.
Comments: 136
Favorites: 317
Likes: 743
Dislikes: 2
7. Re: pandarr
A guy on Reddit asked for an answering machine message, so Old Spice Man responds with everything he thinks “pandarr” would need to edit into a great message. 360,000 views so far.
Comments: 722
Favorites: 4,287
Likes: 4907
Dislikes: 26
8. Re: Alyssa_Milano 4
As a back and forth flirtation, Old Spice Man asks where to take the relationship from here. Alyssa Milano famously responded that he should donate $100,000 to a New Orleans oil spill relief fund. That is being referenced, and therefore linked. 395,000 views.
Comments: 210
Favorites: 480
Likes: 990
Dislikes: 8
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
There’s no question that the campaign has resulted in people actually talking about the Old Spice brand again…something that had not been happening previously. But the real question is whether it is sustainable and if consumers will take action. The last report I saw showed sales were down 7%. In a climate where shareholders are looking for immediate results over long-term benefits, how do you turn this influence into sales?
Hey Gary,
I was wondering the same thing as you, but it looks like Old Spice sales have in fact doubled since the launch of the social media campaign. Came across this post today. Looks like all the buzz & write ups is actually paying off quite handsomely. This is great news for the power of social media and the shift to more online based advertising. At the very least it shows how you can hit a big audience offline (superbowl to launch a campaign) and then add/integrate the viral elements of the online world to really hit a homerun.
Here is the write up I found today on mashable.
http://mashable.com/2010/07/27/old-spice-sales/
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