A catchy dance video, and a social media near miss

This is a wonderfully cute new video from Samsung for their Galaxy 580 smartphone, with a tagline that fits perfectly with what I talk about here all the time:

“use your influence”

Watch:

What this commercial (seeded “viral” video, actually) positively SCREAMS for is some kind of action to be taken to help you, the viewer, “use your influence” to share the video, interact with it in some way, connect with the dancers or music, or engage in some fashion with the brand or product.

The concept is cute, and nicely done. Anyone with kids will recognize their own in this little girl as she just lets her imagination spill out all over the dance floor, meaning millions of people could instantly relate to the ad and likely (like me) want to pass it around.

But this is a great campaign concept that, to my mind, is only about 25% done. It could get enormous payoff by extending it across the social media sphere in some manner, inviting viewers in to interact and share it with their friends and networks. A viral video attempt is great, and I suspect this one will get some moderate steam. But take the next step and pull me, the viewer, in deep.

And no, getting me to use this as a social media “near miss” case study doesn’t count. Yes I’m using what influence I have to share it on my blog, but I’m doubting “marketing bloggers” were a target market on the original Samsung campaign brief. I’m talking about doing this at scale.

The Lesson of Old Spice: TV is Simply a Starting Point

If you were anywhere near almost any social media tool earlier today, you probably heard about the remarkable personalized response videos from “the Old Spice guy” (“I’m on a horse, backwards”). It started in what seemed like a one-off, then quickly picked up steam as short, quickly produced personalized videos started popping up with Mr. Old Spice, clad only in a towel, replying to tweets, blog posts, Facebook comments, and YouTube replies from all over the Web.

In some cases, such as with the actress Alyssa Milano, she tweeted and got her own response video (several actually) with an hour or so (and the wide-eyed optimist in me is hoping that part wasn’t staged in advance). All in all it gave the impression that a small creative team from Weiden+Kennedy were camped out in a small stage (or hell, a large bathroom) with the actor and some live social monitoring tools, creating what will go down as one of the best examples of integration between advertising and social media yet seen.

There are a lot of lessons to be had – the value of engaging with the community and how you shouldn’t just aim for the celebrities but engage with fans across the board; the power of realtime social media monitoring tools; the impact of smart humor; the potential payoff from brands that are willing to take risks; etc.

What resonated with me however is the idea that this stunt, more than any other I can recall, cements the fact that the once-glorified 30 second TV spot is no longer the epitome of advertising – it’s merely a starting point. TV is now more than ever simply one channel, among many, to seed your content out into the marketplace, so it can be built on and blown out through creative use of new social channels like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and more.

This isn’t a new idea, of course, but sometimes it takes a truly creative campaign to shock your eyes open to both the reality and the possibilities of all the new toys we’ve perhaps grown too used to. Hats off to the team at WK and Old Spice, today was definitely a pleasant and exciting jolt and a hint of what’s to come.

Yet again, social media is not about any tool or platform

It’s an argument that never seems to die, and only gains strength when the next hot platform or tool becomes the darling of the social media world. So let’s shoot it down again:

Social media is not about Twitter. It’s bigger than Facebook. There’s more to it than blogging, YouTube, LinkedIn, or [insert platform du jour here].

Mitch Joel and Joe Jaffe brought this one up during the most recent Jaffe Juice podcast, in response to the “do you tweet?” challenge to traditional ad agencies from the CMO of JetBlue, Marty St. George:

The tweet itself isn’t really the issue – it was rather innocuous and kind of funny, when you get down to it. Especially when you look imagine the key biz dev guys at some of the big shops scrambling their team to “follow him! follow him! For the love of God, at least throw the man an @!”

But Joe and Mitch used the tweet to bring up a larger, and valid point: whether an agency is on, and monitoring, Twitter isn’t really a valid litmus test for their digital savvy. Yes, in this day and age it’s probably dumb of them not to, but it shouldn’t be a make or break test. Why?

Because as I said above, social media isn’t about one platform or tool. It’s about developing a certain mindset and understanding about how the way brands interact with their customers (and critics) has fundamentally changed. How people want to be part of a brand, to define, to make it their own, and not just be talked at. like in the golden years of the traditional agency.

Twitter is only four years old, about the same length of time that Facebook has been open to the world beyond college students. YouTube is all of five years old. Five. They may die any day now for all we know. Twitter could pull a Friendfeed, get bought up, cashed out, and ignored into oblivion despite the howling protests of its passionate users. A year from now something currently seeking seed funding could be doing to Facebook what it did to MySpace (and Friendster).

The tools will change, the platforms will evolve. No “are you using this tool or that one” litmus test should hold any real weight when determining the social media intelligence of your agencies. It’s about the mindset and the fundamental understanding of the new ways of doing business – that’s what you should look for in your agencies, those attributes that will survive the inevitable platform transitions that will make us all look back fondly at our cute Twitter addictions.