Luke Alexander's blog

As 90% of the universe’s brands send their marketing departments to seminars on how to “use social media”, the others are making everyone else feel stupid by getting it spectacularly right first time.

Whoever is behind Old Spice’s campaign deserves a medal, or at the very least a pay rise, for showing how to take advantage of those much-obsessed-over new opportunities without overthinking, misjudging or watering down.

For those who haven’t seen it, Old Spice has taken its highly successful ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’ commercial and turned it into a running gag which has taken over Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and a whole other set of channels, where the Old Spice Man answers questions from real people in short, 30 second YouTube videos.  It’s funny, addictively watchable and is starting genuine conversations online about the product.  Here are three things I think they’ve got particularly right:

It’s funny and I want to watch it

No matter how many times it’s repeated, the adage that ‘content is king’ rarely seems to sink in.  Without any massive expenditure, a celebrity appearance or indeed anything other than a film crew, a decent actor and a funny writer, Old Spice has created something genuinely interesting to watch.  Putting your faith in a cleverly made character and some solid running gags take a bit of courage, but this is the kind of content (in novel, play, TV form) which has endured for millennia, with no additional software required…

And building interactivity into the concept rather than the technology means it’s easy to access and quick to make while still encouraging involvement.

It’s everywhere

It’s not a ‘twitter campaign’ or a ‘facebook campaign’ – in fact, it’s pretty channel-neutral.  Rather than obsess over where their demographic lives, the Old Spice team have cleverly created a central campaign which can feed effortlessly into all of these channels.  Particularly genius is the decision to proactively film the Old Spice man answering random questions from Yahoo Answers.  It leads to good content, shows that they ‘get it’, and gives them access to another community in the process.

It’s suited to how people use the internet

This campaign is not a standalone asset created for a website and ‘spread virally’.  It’s designed from the ground up to work with how people really use the internet.  It’s quick, genuinely interactive, personal and open.

These attributes bring massive benefits – and means that Old Spice can do things like engage direct with celebs on twitter and garner endorsement by the bucketful without spending a cent.

If you’re employed by a marketing or digital agency, and want to get some first hand experience of what is at the core of the term ‘social network’, head down to the Royal Festival Hall on Tuesdays during November from 6-8pm.

I was there for a NaNoWriMo London write-in this week, which was an ample demonstration of online social networking at its finest.  iPhones were out on the table, netbooks flitting between facebook and twitter; if I saw a photo in years to come I would be able to confidently state, based only on evidence of the technology lying around, that it was 2009.

These devices on their own were meaningless; what made it a great demonstration of the power of online social networks is the fact that we were almost all strangers, meeting because we a) had a shared interest and b) had been given the tools to share it.

Indeed, the event brought back to me the meaning of the term, which I use so regularly in my day job that it has begun to lose its meaning.  In fact, the way some marketing professionals use it, you’d think anything which has ever touched a web server would qualify.

Words, even technical terms, should retain a little bit of magic that lets them thrive and grow with their meanings.  Words aren’t fixed concepts, like numbers – they have the benefit of an etymology, heritage and resistance to translation which allows them to mean, in a way, more than their meaning.

Email – electronic mail.  Internet – an international network.  Web – a world wide web of linked information.  All of these terms get submerged in the sheer number of people rushing to market, package and deliver them.

At any rate, this NaNoWriMo meet-up made me re-consider the power of the social network, in its online context.  When I was a lot younger, the technological underpinnings of online activity were much more limiting – no facebook, myspace or twitter.  But social networks were still the order of the day, even if that wasn’t how we referred to them.

Back then, I interacted with my online social networks using livejournal, usenet newsgroups and IRC.  What was true then, however, is still true now.  Social networks are created when people, using whatever tools they have at their disposal, create pathways of regular or expected communication between themselves.  Facebook, linkedin, elgg, etc all provide excellent tools to achieve this, but the core principle is that those users are the active element in the equation.

This is not the same as saying that social networks operate on a content-driven model (which may or may not be true).  Sharing cool virals and whatnot is a great strategy for many companies hoping to take advantage of social networks, but it is not the way to create social networks.  To do this, you need to provide users with the tools they need to connect as well as, of course, a reason to connect in the first place – whether it’s getting to know their colleagues, finding music from new bands, or writing a novel in a month.

I couldn’t let today pass without marking it in some way – though certainly not as expertly as XKCD has done.

My first ever web presence was on Geocities, and I can still remember the excitement of having contributed something on a global level in a way few people had ever done before.  As time goes on and the web relentlessly increments its version numbers, it’s important to remember how significant and emotionally impactful this was for the first ‘mainstream’ users of the web.

Geocities – with its free accounts, easy page creation and ‘anyone can be a web publisher’ attitude – is a shrine to that, and in a way it is the first ever global, virtual ruin.  A reminder of how innovation is an evolutionary process.

When Yahoo! bought it it was already one of the web’s running jokes.  In less than a decade, its naive, optimistic attitude and steadfastedly Web 1.0 attitude had become hopelessly out of date, and it didn’t even have the geeky elitism of Usenet and IRC or the early adopter community of Livejournal to redeem it.

So RIP Geocities.  I can’t help feeling something should go permanently in its place to mark the occasion.  Preferably surrounded with BLINK tags…

(I can’t remember the exact URL of my Geocities site, but I remember it was in the Area51 ‘neighbourhood’, that it had a purple background, and orange text, all achieved through judicious use of TD, TR, BGCOLOR and FONT FACE tags.)

Update: xkcd has now taken down its tribute; sorry if you missed it

I don’t attend a great number of conferences, and I am always fascinated when I do by the struggle speakers have to say something genuinely visionary while at the same time accurately reflecting the realities to which the organisations they represent are acutely sensitive.

In this context, today’s Westminster eForum on VoD, IPTV and Webcasting managed a particularly good balancing act, with some excellent commentary from Richard Halton (Project Canvas), Tess Alps (Thinkbox), Asanga Gunatillaka (Virgin TV) and Pete Johnson (BBFC) amongst others. All managed to avoid being bogged down by gazing into crystal balls and demonstrated quite how exciting a combination high quality creative content and new distribution methods can be.

Much of the discussion focused on what on-demand channels need to offer consumers to attract mainstream viewers. For what it’s worth, I think many of the panelists underestimated the appetite for VoD services based on current behaviours which I feel require only a unified and accessible platform to be changed forever.

For this reason, it was great to hear John Keeling from Arqiva mention the power of the PS3′s iPlayer integration, and fascinating to find out more about Project Canvas, which will offer an open platform for public broadcasting, a new wave of semi-professional but high quality content providers and traditional broadcasters alike- think AppStore meets Freeview meets YouTube channels.

Much of the rest of the discussion concerned the difficulty of regulating on-demand (and particularly Internet-based services). On this I have very little to say other than gosh, that does sound difficult.

One theme not touched on quite as much as I’d like was the nature of the content itself, and how this affects both the role of traditional broadcasters and regulatory bodies.

A fantastic piece of non-news reported widely today was Pear Analytics’ report which claimed that around forty percent of content on Twitter is ‘pointless babble’.  A scientific definition if ever I heard one, and one already enthusiastically adopted by the Twitter community in the time-honoured fashion.

The report, which inspired headlines truly worthy of The Onion, also somewhat scornfully pointed out that almost as many tweets were ‘conversational’.  Ignoring for a second the relatively small sample size and the selective US work-day only timings, this in itself is interesting.  One of the benefits of microblogging media like Twitter is that it is fundamentally conversational, designed with replies and mentions built-in.

Many have already reacted to the report, and – in the UK – to Janet Street-Porter’s comically superficial analysis of the service.  Of these, the majority offer good rebuttals and analyses of the issue – and I won’t spend any time defending Twitter.  Indeed, even these responses often go too far in over-stating the importance of the service, which I am confident will in a relatively short period evolve into a distributed, potentially open source, system with multiple ‘suppliers’ (more on this another day, perhaps).

One point which did interest me in its persistence, however, is the ‘fact’ that teenagers don’t use Twitter.

Some important caveats even at this stage.  Firstly, teenagers’ use of Twitter is extremely difficult to analyse, particularly across different territories, and actual evidence is scarce, comprised mostly of a single Nielsen survey which lumps teenagers in the 2-24 age group and anecdotal reports like the (again, Onion-inspired) Morgan Stanley report written by a 15 year old.

Secondly, as pointed out in this excellent response (along with plenty of other good points) the results actually show that the proportion of different ages on Twitter is closer to real-life population splits than we would normally expect from online media, not some wholehearted back-turning by under 19s.

And of course, thirdly, there is the question of whether we should care if teenagers use Twitter anyway.  My first reaction on seeing the news was that Twitter had somehow ensured an early maturity: much like usenet and IRC in the 90s, where the relative complexity of the medium tended towards a slightly older community than modern social networks like facebook.  That the service’s popularity is increasing so rapidly despite the apparent absence of teenagers makes it more interesting as a phenomenon, not less, and certainly doesn’t devalue its worth.

But even if we ignore these points, and assume that the most extreme case is correct and that teens and tweets don’t mix, I wonder if this is the start of evidence of a generation shift in internet use.  Those who are currently 13-19 are quite possibly the first generation for whom use of the internet is completely normal, in the sense that TV use and widespread availability of telecoms is for my own generation (say, 21-29 year olds).

To this generation, what is the value in being an early adopter?  Most of my contemporaries remember having to configure IRQs and DMAs explicitly just to play a computer game, and a time when they would run multiple searchs on AltaVista and Yahoo to get a decent crop of results, before Google.  The difficulty of using these computer systems (and the relative simplicity of the hardware and software at the time) effectively made early adoption the only option in many situations.

A culture of experimentation and community learning lies at the heart of the open source movement, of peer to peer file distribution, of ‘hacker’ culture, all of which have led directly to the majority of the software platforms we use today.  Aside from professionals or academics, many of those with the time and energy to contribute were young people: teenagers playing with the box in the corner of the room their parents were too scared to do much with, or students procrastinating between essays and lab work.

I certainly owe any technical ability and experience I possess to this phenomenon.  Do current teenagers gain anything from such experimentation?  I honestly don’t know – but if not, this might suggest why we would start to see new channels (particularly those which are arguably less user-friendly than facebook et al) receive less attention from this age group.