How Old Spice Made Virality Happen
by David HogueFriday, July 16th, 2010
Almost everyone has heard about and seen the Old Spice videos swarming across the Internet this week, and nearly everyone has regarded this campaign as brilliant, because Old Spice has done something that is very hard to do: they successfully and intentionally created something viral.
How did Old Spice make virality happen?
Let’s step back a moment and first take a look at something else that appeared on the Web this week: Google’s Paul Adams shared his slides from a presentation about the real structures of social networks. It’s a long (216 slides!), detailed, and fantastically informative lesson on how social communication and interaction occurs.
Why Google is Scared of Facebook, or How Social Networks Really Work
Starting on slide 147 he discusses the role of influencers in social networks, and on slide 159 he presents a graphic of how people think influencers work and how they actually work.
Go look at the diagram, because Old Spice is using this influencer diagram to create viral videos via Twitter where Isaiah Mustafa (the handsome, shirtless Old Spice guy from the television commercials and YouTube videos) creates personalized videos for people:
Old Spice is Making Custom Videos (via Mashable)
Old Spice helped these videos go viral by starting with seed videos created for influential people (e.g., Perez Hilton), because they know that if they reach people who have large audiences the influencers will share these things with their audiences if they like them, and especially if these things feature the influential person. Once the seed was planted and influential people started responding via Twitter, Old Spice created new videos for people who responded. It grew (well, it really exploded) from there.
Influence the influencer, and you influence all of their followers, too.
