I am, of course, talking about the wildly successful online promotion that Old Spice ran yesterday, where the ad team spent the entire day taping and posting personalized responses to messages on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and more.  In case you haven’t seen the new Old Spice campaign, you can watch their latest commercial here… but this campaign has been so pervasive I’m guessing most  of you have.

It’s been a few hours, so by now this statistic is already out of date, but as of this morning Youtube surfers had spent over 11 years worth of time watching the Old Spice personalized responses, and I’d imagine that’s only the beginning. Over the coming days and weeks, I’m sure their videos will get even more views.  I’m sure it wasn’t cheap to have the ad company spend the entire day crafting these video responses, but I’d be very surprised if the exposure Old Spice body wash received yesterday wasn’t a great deal more economical than the cost of a national television ad campaign. I’d also be surprised if the exposure they received yesterday wasn’t much more effective than a tv ad campaign because instead of interrupting the viewer (which is what a commercial does), people sought out the videos, watched them, and shared their favorites with their friends.

This is probably the best piece of online marketing I’ve ever seen. Not only did they leverage several forms of media, but the uniqueness of the campaign captured the attention of celebrities, popular media programs, athletes and talk show hosts, many of whom provided free promotion of the campaign to their own audience.  This helped build things to a fever pitch (and most definitely resulted in significant amounts of lost productivity yesterday), and all the while the audience was being sold something.  I’m positive that sales of Old Spice body wash are going to go through the roof after yesterday’s promotion.

It just goes to show that online marketing and traditional marketing are getting more entwined every single day, and when you get the mix of technology and marketing just right, the results are incredible. It’s already happening, but in the coming years, the blurred line between website development and promotion and traditional marketing will be completely erased.  Companies who want to survive will have to bring both adept technical and design abilities along with a keen marketing sense to the table, eotherwise they will not measure up to the needs of the market.

As I write this, almost 20% of the posts on the first page of their wall are negative in nature.  Kudos to FutureShop for not simply deleting anything negative said about their company, as one might expect they would. Even though that would be the easy way out, it’d probably be more damaging the the long run.  While it does seem that they are trying to address and resolve each complaint individually, it appears some are being missed or ignored.  Compounding this issue is how Facebook displays responses to wall posts on their page.  By default all responses are hidden, with a small link at the bottom of the post that says “View Feedback (x)” where x is the number of responses that post has received.  So unless a visitor or fan clicks that view feedback button, they may not even be aware that FutureShop is attempting to resolve any of the complaints at all!

I’m not trying to scare you off of Social Media, but one thing you must understand and be prepared for if you’re going to engage in social media is that you will not have 100% control… but you might just learn a thing or two about your business and how others perceive it.  Take FutureShop for example: being a bit of a geek myself, I have dealt with FutureShop as a company for many years (well over a decade) and in that time I’ve learned that the typical modus operandi of the store managers is to treat unhappy customers rather poorly unless a complaint is put into the general manager or FutureShop Corporate itself (at which point they will turn on a dime and bend over backward to make sure you’re happy).  While there are exceptions to the rule, I’ve seen this pattern of behaviour repeatedly for quite some time.  I don’t know FutureShop’s internal policies as I’m nothing more than a customer, but if I had to guess, I would imagine that the thinking behind this policy (if it even is a policy… who knows, it could just be the natural development of their customer service due to any number of factors) would be that if people don’t complain to a higher level in the company, they probably won’t complain to anyone else.

Because of how FutureShop has embraced Facebook, it is becoming much easier for unhappy customers to complain publicly, and making a process easier will always result in more people fulfilling that process, which in this case is translating into more and more complaints for FutureShop.  It will be interesting to see if an increase in complaints will affect business on a large scale, perhaps prompting an overall change to the view towards customer service.

So remember, while social media can be great for your business, don’t forget you are essentially standing up in front of a crowd and – just like in real life – it is possible (and easy) for your company to be publicly embarrassed.

In our next social media post, we’ll look at the best practices and steps you can take to ensure your company doesn’t become the butt of a social media joke.

1. Facebook has more than 350 million active users.
2. The Average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook
3. More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook
4. Average user becomes a fan of 2 Pages each month

Facebook started as a cleaner alternative to MySpace and had its initial popularity in the student demographic, however it’s grown steadily and become a massive social network that most certainly contains people who would be interested in your services or products. Best of all, you can take advantage of that market with little to no cost.

Business profiles are not new to Facebook, but initially they were only available to large companies. Large brands like Walmart and Verizon had profile pages for their company, users could visit and become a “fan” of the company. Then when users visited the “fan’s” profile, they would see a link to the company profile. On a medium to large scale, this can gain a business a lot of exposure, but the cost of having a business profile was very high… until now. Recently, Facebook opened up ‘business pages’ so that anyone can create a business profile for free. Now you don’t have to be a fortune 500 company to tap into Facebook’s 350-million+ users.

So How Do I Get Started?

It’s pretty straightforward to get started, you can create your own page by clicking here.

Step 1: Spend some time deciding on the best category for your business, because your category is not easily changed later.

Step 2: Enter your business name and click create.

Step 3: The more information about your business you upload, the better, but you should at least enter a basic write-up, operating hours and location (if applicable), a link to your webpage, and a picture of your storefront or logo. Any extra information is great – if you’re a Real Estate agent for instance, you can post open house’s you are running as events on the profile. If you have a portfolios or pictures of jobs you’ve done, put them in an album with a description for each picture. Post any customer testimonials on your main page.

Setp 4: Click on your business name in the top left corner, and you should then see a “Publish This Page” link. You need to click this before anyone will be able to see your business on Facebook.

Step 5: Finally, near the top right you should see the text “Become a Fan” (but only if you’re logged into your personal Facebook account – if you’re not, you can click here to create one, it just takes a minute).

Now the fun begins, your friends can see your business from your profile and become a fan of it. Then it will display on their page as well. It’s likely that you have some of your customers on your friends list already, or if you are just creating an account, it’s likely that some of your customers are already on Facebook. Find them, and ask them to become a fan of your business. The more fans you have, the more exposure you’ll get – and the more potential you’ll have to get new customers through Facebook.

Of course, Lifeline has a business profile right here. Feel free to become a fan of us, we’d really appreciate it. If you’re a customer, We’ll become a fan of your business too!

So how do you get your customers to become Fans of your business? Well, a contest is a great way to go about this. We give away $20 every month to one random fan on our Facebook Page, so become a fan now for your chance to win!