Do you want to smell the success of a social media campaign that will engage your audience to no end? Swan dive, into the best social media strategy of your life.

But first, let’s have a look behind the scenes with the most recent social media success story.

Old Spice and advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy, along with actor Isaiah Mustafa, partnered to create a campaign that took the web by storm. After introducing the Old Spice Man character (played by Mustafa) the team proceeded to seed various social networks with an invitation to ask the dashing shirtless man any questions they may have.

Using reddit and twitter, the responses were tracked carefully and those that contributed interesting questions or were submitted by high profile individuals on social networks received a video reply that was posted on Youtube.

A team of creative’s, marketers, and writers made about 87 short video replies in the first 11 hours. That works out to about 7 minutes per reply, including writing and filming. And an astonishing 180 videos in total were made during the entire campaign. The entire campaign was tweeted, retweeted, emailed, and shared on Facebook multiple times. Mashable provides a look at the Old Spice campaign by the numbers.

So what was it about the campaign that made it the success it was? One interesting point to note is once the original ad (above) was released, there was no brand mentions with the 100+ video responses. It was simply entertaining to watch and most already knew it was the Old Spice man.

The big take away to this success story is how the integration of several social media options were used together. It allowed the marketers to seed, engage, respond, and viewers to submit, view, and share.

While this was one helluva marketing and production feat, its easy to see how combining the social media options helped. But like many viral or social campaigns, the big idea and the seeding will likely determine the results.

Keep in mind that it doesn’t always have to include amazing video production. Take a look at successful social media campaigns like Will It Blend. A great idea can go a long way.

Social media is much more than creating a Facebook fan page or Twitter account. You have to think about how to engage with your network. If you simply broadcast, you want to do so with value, such as promotional offers or news of new products or sales. But for most that don’t have legions of fans like Apple or similar, you want to share and engage. Offer info of value.

Social media contributes to online branding, reputation management, awareness, word of mouth, and more. It creates a huge opportunity, but as Seth Godin says; it’s a process, not an event.

Edit: Check this parody entitled ‘New Spice’

Social Media Swan Dive is a post from: Online Branding Blog - reactorr.com

While traditional branding may take decades, online branding has been know to happen in a fraction of the time. The viral convenience of the web allows everyone to tweet, share, post, and more with social media. Facebook fan pages provide an outlet for advocates, forum discussions create a dialogue to engage in, and much of all this happens in real-time.

Brand Strategy 101

It starts with determining your brand’s objectives. Determining just who your brand is, a persona of sorts, creates a foundation and metric to measure by. Is it the best tasting, cheapest, or premium product or service of a category? Once you have an objective, identify who would be your target audience. Selecting a type or demographic works better than the ol’ shotgun approach every time. Targeting also results in better communications and creative that results in better messages, as opposed to trying to appeal all of the people all of the time. Following that, figuring out your brand barriers so you can deal with any issues allows for better marketing. There’s always something; strengths, vulnerabilities, opportunities, threats, political, economic, technological, or social.

A brand is about customer perception, and creating the necessary influence positions the brand in the mind of the consumer. Adding benefits and/or value create brand equity. The assets which provide brand equity in traditional marketing are fairly different than online branding, although there is some overlap. With the traditional way of branding, your strategy may include public relations, advertising, and traditional marketing like pricing strategies, retention plans, and more. Don’t forget your 4 P’s.

Online Branding Essentials

Online branding includes a few key components, those being; display advertising (banners), search marketing (PPC), social media (or SMM, for social media marketing), search engine optimization (SEO), and online reputation management (like online PR meets SEO). Each of these tools can leverage your brand, but when used in combination effectively, its a powerful marketing strategy that can rival traditional marketing.

Online Branding Strategy

The online brand promise, which was conceived while defining the objective, is where the journey begins. It could be anything from convenience or entertainment to selection or value. The important thing to remember is this is your mantra and almost every marketing or branding effort shoud support your brand promise. The promise builds on an experience which helps meet the objective, and build brand equity, if you deliver.

While online branding strategies vary per business, from hotels, clothing, electronics, financials products, entertainment or another vertical, the core of the online branding strategy is still broken down to advertising, social media, seo, and online pr.

Read a summary on reactorr’s online branding services and how it can drive your online marketing efforts.

Online Branding Strategies is a post from: Online Branding Blog - reactorr.com

Despite your best efforts, and what you might think, your brand is managed by consumers. But before you get defensive, because I’m sure you’ve done a great job so far, allow me to explain.

Regardless of whether your brand has an online presence in the form of a website, it exists in the mind of the consumer and their conversations whether online or offline are going to shape your brand.

These conversations have been taking place without your knowledge for some time, and you can use an assortment of online tools to monitor those conversations. Besides just Googling for answers, there are several other ways to tap into the conversation.

Start with Twitter to get things rolling. Twitter is referred to as microblogging, and depending who starts the conversation it can spread within this community like wild fire.

Also be sure to use Google alerts, which you can setup as it happens, once a day, and once a week for notification.

You can also listen to what’s happening within the blogosphere by checking Technorati and a Google blog search for others signs of buzz or fires that need your attention.

Also keep in mind that your site analytics can provide some insight too. You might notice traffic from a long phrase or something unique to your brand.

Brand Management with Social Media is a post from: Online Branding Blog - reactorr.com