My Father used Old Spice. I can still remember the smell wafting out with the steam from his shower when he cracked open the bathroom door. It was, simply… wonderful.

Many years ago (Before Social Media Marketing).

When we asked Dad what that smell was, he said “frou-frous” and encouraged us kids to get some for him for Father’s Day or Christmas.

Of course, I didn’t know it then, but Old Spice had a brand image that most companies would kill for — then or now. Yet Old Spice had languished in the face of new fragrances that were accompanied by hip, megabucks marketing campaigns; their brand seemed dormant. Until two weeks ago.

Old Spice Guy - Social Media Marketing Icon

Old Spice Guy Video

As it turns out, you can indeed teach an Old Dog new tricks if you have the right creative team and willingness to test social media marketing.

Old Spice launched an aggressive social media campaign as a follow-on to their successful Super Bowl commercial featuring Old Spice Guy. In a matter of a few days they cranked out over 180 YouTube videos that have “Gone Viral” (viewers are telling their friends, who tell their friends, etc.). Heck, just go ahead and watch them for the sheer fun of it — they’re really entertaining!

Then, Old Spice Guy engaged in banter in key online communities such as Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and blogs. The “engagement” included celebrities such as Demi Moore, Ellen DeGeneres, Apollo Ohno and Kevin Rose (founder of Digg) that drew in their huge fan base as well.

You now can even get a “customizable” Old Spice Guy voicemail generator created by an enterprising entrepreneur.

What’s the secret to this runaway social media marketing success?

• Creativity
• Talent
• Smarts
• Chutzpah!

It turns out there’s a lot of sniping online that the campaign was all well and good, but Old Spice (Proctor & Gamble) was rumored to have lost money. Not so. The campaign cost was as near to zero as you can get, their YouTube channel alone has over 11.6 M views at the moment and Old Spice has already seen a 107% increase in sales.

What’s more, Old Spice Guy (Isaiah Mustafa – previously under-employed actor and former NFL football player) has just signed a contract to appear in a movie with Jennifer Aniston, Colin Farrell and Jamie Fox. The creative geniuses behind this social media marketing coup will, no doubt, be able to name their own future as well.

SWAN DIVE!

How many times have you been in a conversation with someone about Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter to hear them proudly tout how many people follow, friend or connect to them? Herein lies the basic problem. After all, if you ONLY had 5 “followers” but those followers were:

• The Dali Lama
• The President of the United States
• The Queen of England
• The Pope
• Bruce Springsteen (I can’t help myself sometimes…)

wouldn’t you think that was pretty awesome? And well you might — because, it is not HOW MANY — it is WHO, how ENGAGED they are with you and whether they contribute to the GOALS you set out to meet with those Social Networking channels in the first place.

If one of the above luminaries blogged about what a terrific product/service you offered, would it not change your results, just a little? Connecting and engaging with Key Influencers online in your markets or industry is far more valuable than simply building up a large group of subscribers who have little ability to help meet your bottom-line goals.

While how many people subscribe to you is a good statistic to track, it is not usually THE definitive statistic that matters. What matters is how the people you connect with through Social Networks contribute to your goal success.

In addition to tracking THE definitive goal statistics, you’ll also want to track milestone metrics along the way (such as how many follower by channel). This will give you the raw intelligence you need for performance management. If all you track are followers, expect disappointment.

And, while I am on this topic – let’s talk about goals. Most organizations don’t set them at all as though merely the act of showing up in those networks were the goal. Those that do set goals often do not ask enough of their Social Media Marketing — aggressively connecting the actions to results will help you see where more can be acheived. Here’s  a partial list of some of the goals you might consider: Sales, Lead Generation, Search Engine Ranking, Online Reputation Management, Customer Insight, Customer Support, Product/Service Research, Competitor Tracking, Thought Leadership and Brand Management. There are more.

If you’ve been holding back because you thought that it won’t work  for B2B, you might want to take a look at the chart below from recent eMarketer research that reports a planned 43% increase in Social Networking spending for 2010 among B2B study respondents. You might say that getting into Social Networking and measuring your results is becoming a new competitive baseline for good business practices.

Also interesting is the strong spending increase B2B marketers project for webinars (+ 26%), a topic that we covered in Generating Internet Business Leads: Webinars — a recent podcast with Sarah Kling, Founder and CEO of UEVision. This podcast covers how her company successfully uses webinars to build a robust sales lead pipeline and the role Social Media Marketing plays in that success.

Bear in mind a basic human instinct is to trust peers, colleagues and friends more than advertisements or marketing communication from people they have no relationship with or trust established. Social Networking gives us all unprecedented ability to do just that with ease and speed.

Social Networking is steadily growing as mainstream activity for personal and professional use. Getting a measurable Social Media Marketing Strategy & Plan in place with a performance management system that tracks the right metrics is rapidly becoming an essential component of remaining competitive.

This past week I gave a workshop in Silicon Valley for the Marketing Education Series for Entrepreneurs (MESE) titled: Growing Your Business Fast Using Social Media and Web 2.0 Marketing.

Whenever I speak with people about Social Media there are some recurring themes that I keep hearing:

1) How can I do that AND my day job?
2) Where’s the value in it for my business interests and me?
3) Isn’t it really just for big companies like Dell or Zappos?

The subtext seems to be: What About the Rest of Us?

While preparing for the workshop I tried to find insight to answer those questions and ran across a LinkedIn case study that fit that task. In case that case study missed your radar screen let me tell you about it — it’s a great story as well as instructive.

This is a story about a man named Henck van Ess, a Dutch technology consultant who found happiness on LinkedIn.

Henk was grousing in a couple of his LinkedIn Groups one day about the super-short battery life of his 3G iPhone (I can relate – an incredible invention yet the battery life is horrible).

Before he knew it, he heard from another member of one of his LinkedIn Groups — someone from a Chinese manufacturer — who suggested that they might have a solution.

He tried out the solution, liked it and bought it. You might think that was the end of the story and it would have been sufficient value right there. Yet so delighted was Henk that he again used the LinkedIn — this time the “What am I Doing” section — to crow about his “find.” And he found a wellspring of interest from others on LinkedIn who read his post.

This piece of serendipitous research (albeit not scientific) gave him so many positive responses that he became a distributor, put up a Web store and took orders from 1,200 customers on the first day of business!

The Chinese Manufacturer and Dutch Consultant further collaborated to improve upon the original battery extension solution: 3GJuice is born!

Then Henk told the LinkedIn crew about it and some publicity happened. The NY Times picked up the story… more publicity!

So, we have a LinkedIn member who wasn’t really trying to build a business yet stumbled into one using LinkedIn. Along the way Henk:

Not a bad tally for Social Media’s ability to add value!