The Old Spice Guy is undoubtedly one of the most beloved commercial characters in recent memory — he’s like The Most Interesting Man in the World, but young and apparently unable to stay fully clothed. He burst on the scene back in February and his videos quickly went viral on YouTube.
Well now he’s apparently taking awesomeness to a new level — or the ad execs behind his campaign are, rather. He seems to have heralded the deluge of vids with a tweet:

He then proceeded to send out vids via Twitter to bloggers who have written about him in the past, YouTube commenters, random folks asking random questions on Yahoo Answers, and various and sundry people who have tweeted at him today. He’s working pretty fast, too. After posting a call for questions on Reddit, he responded to a cadre of questions rather rapidly.

This campaign really is a perfect storm of viralty — not only does it target specific bloggers (who are then more likely to cover the whole thing), it also reaches out to less prominent individuals who can be made more aware of Old Spice. Moreover, they become personally invested in the brand because they have actually become a part of the world it has created. We’re not sure if this marathon of videos will lead to more Old Spice products sold — but it definitely creates a brand identity that people will be interested and excited to engage with.

We’re embedding the Old Spice guy’s personal message to Perez Hilton below — Hilton wrote about a new spot at the end of June.

With reality TV now taking the lion’s share of programming, there is a new, insatiable need for talent. It has driven network executives, TV/film producers, casting directors and talent representatives to alternative means of discovering artists, particularly the Internet (Internet). Many people, like Grayson Chance for example, have first blown up in popularity online before talent managers and agents noticed them. But, contrary to what many believe, most Hollywood casting executives are not just randomly trolling YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, etc., to find talent.

Social Casting Campaigns

Talent seekers are now launching formal casting campaigns on social networking and talent-oriented sites. These campaigns are effective, quick to set up, and simple to manage. This has resulted in the creation of a new category of interactive online casting tools and resources that are growing in popularity and use. Links to job postings and casting notices can also be socialized among the big networks via badges and widgets to increase awareness and submissions. Earlier this month, for example, the Food Network launched an open casting call via YouTube.

It’s not just limited to the television and film business — modeling and brand advertising are also going social. For example, luxury discount retailer HauteLook.com recently turned to a top casting resource to host a model search for an advertising campaign. Cookie Dough Bites, a frozen snack, did the same to find new viral content to promote the brand. With these dedicated casting portals and resources attracting new talent, a wider variety of casting needs can be met.

For both talent and aspiring talent, there has never been a more direct way to personally connect with top casting directors, producers, and agents. Rather than simply hoping for attention resulting from enough views on YouTube or MySpace, talent can now more efficiently and directly reach Hollywood executives. Online casting does not just involve endless lists of casting opportunities, but also the ability to create personal profiles to share photos and demo reels, and socialize with a gamut of potential future employers. Because these tools are casting-specific, casting directors and agents are able to easily post job notices, browse through talent, and communicate with potential job candidates.

The rise of people like Tila Tequila, Grayson Chance, Perez Hilton and countless others sent a powerful message to people about leveraging social networks to gain Hollywood attention. It also showed major casting agents and networks that the Internet is a viable resource for finding and filling the need for talent, creating a new and exciting category on the Internet.

The effect on the casting industry has been very positive and will likely continue to grow in importance. Casting executives have a new, constantly growing well for finding talent — and talent have new direct resources and opportunities in Hollywood no matter where they are in the world.

New Media Age reports that the UK specials follow a successful Domino’s pilot program that ran earlier in the year at select locations in the country.

What’s especially interesting about Domino’s UK Foursquare strategy is that although the pizza chain is widely popular in the region, there are no stores with dine-in restaurants.

It seems a tad out of the ordinary that an establishment that is primarily seen as a delivery service would reward patrons who visit physical brick-and-mortar outlets and check in on Foursquare. We can only presume that the strategy is to increase takeout orders and lower franchise costs associated with delivery.

Still, the promotion could easily help the corporation drum up more sales. On Foursquare, users receive notifications when their friends check in at venues. Pizza checkin notifications from friends could certainly work to convince hungry Foursquare users to order or pick up Domino’s pizza.

According to the company, “only a handful of accounts have these features presently”, but it will expand on a gradual basis to more accounts. One of the biggest additions is the ability for businesses to accept direct messages on the service, even from people they don’t follow.

Here is an overview of some of the new features that businesses can expect to enjoy in the near future:

Starting Up with Twitter Business Center

A small group of business users are getting e-mails from the Twitter team, inviting them to test “the Twitter Toolkit.” This is how the invite e-mail begins:

“Congrats!

Your account has been invited to participate in testing one of Twitter’s newest business-centric features, the Twitter Toolkit. We’ll be rolling it out to you within the next few days (if you don’t have it already) for your business or organization’s Twitter account. To get started, visit your business’ Twitter account settings…

http://twitter.com/settings/account

…and look for the ‘Business’ tab. From there you’ll be directed to fill out some information which will help us verify your business or organization.”

Once businesses clicks the link, they have to activate the business features for their accounts. It then takes them to a page where they fill in information such as business contact info and whether they are a small business, large company or an individual/group:

Digging into the Features

Once a business activates its account, it is automatically verified. This is important because Twitter Verified Accounts have been limited to individuals thus far. It seems like Twitter has finally decided to expand the Verified Accounts program to brands and organizations.

After activation, four tabs appear: Overview, Business Info, Verification and Contributors. Overview provides basic information about business accounts and Business Info allows a company to change the information that it submitted during initial registration. The Contributors tab gives businesses the ability to add multiple users to a business account so that they can tweet on its behalf.

The tab that interested us the most though was the “Verification” tab. Take a look at the “Preferences” section in this screenshot we obtained of the Verification tab:

Twitter has a new feature for businesses: the ability to accept direct messages from any of their followers, regardless of whether they follow that person or not. This is huge for businesses that perform customer service via Twitter; they can get feedback and deal with private customer issues without having to follow the person back first.

The microblogging startup seems focused on getting more businesses the tools they need to effectively manage their Twitter accounts. There are no details yet about how much Twitter will charge businesses for these features. For now the company is refining and testing its Twitter Toolkit before its eventual public debut.

Although iPad’s browser doesn’t support Flash, someone seemingly found the way to run World of Warcraft on the iPad via Gaikai, as seen in the screenshot below.

The entire thing would be far more credible if we had a video, but it poses some interesting questions: When (if) the technology behind Gaikai (or its competitors OTOY or OnLive) reaches maturity, could it be used for playing graphically intensive games on the iPad?

We’ve raided our own toolkits to come up with some of the best tools and services for B2B marketers that want to get the most out of social media.

Salesforce.com

The mac daddy of web-based CRM products hasn’t been afraid to embrace social media. In the last six months, Salesforce.com has introduced a number of different solutions via its Service Cloud 2 platform for helping integrate social media with the Salesforce.com ecosystem.

One of the best applications for B2B marketers who use Salesforce.com is Salesforce for Twitter. Don’t confuse this with Chatter, Salesforce.com’s Facebook for Business, Salesforce for Twitter will let you pull in and monitor Twitter feeds and accounts within the Salesforce.com CRM.

What makes this fantastic is that you can assign cases or leads based on a tweet directly in the CRM that can then be followed up on and monitored along with the other aspects of your work flow. What makes social media more difficult for B2B marketers isn’t that the tools can’t translate from B2C to B2B — they can — it’s that many times those tools don’t integrate well with existing platforms and solutions that a B2B business might have in place.

HootSuite

HootSuite is a great tool not only for managing multiple Twitter accounts (or allowing multiple users access to an account), but also for managing multiple social networks. In November, HootSuite introduced support for LinkedIn and Facebook. HootSuite also now supports WordPress blogs, which works great if you want to have a way to schedule posts and messages to multiple networks. HootSuite also supports alerts and stats tracking. HootSuite is free.

CoTweet

Billing itself as a Twitter CRM tool, CoTweet has been used by a number of big brands, including Ford and JetBlue, and it offers an easy way to manage multiple accounts and also allow multiple users to access a single account. CoTweet also lets you monitor keywords and trends and assign updates to colleagues for follow-up, which can be great for lead-generation. CoTweet was acquired by ExactTarget last month. While the service is available for free, an enterprise option is available for large brands or organizations, starting at a pricey $1,500 a month.

SocialTALK

SocialTALK from Syncapse is a social media workflow tool that is designed to help companies control their presence on different platforms and monitor feedback. We covered SocialTALK when it launched in February and it remains one of a handful of services really aimed at helping businesses manage multiple social media accounts from a single dashboard. You can create and schedule video and photo posts for Facebook, have multiple user-access levels, access multiple pages from the same dashboard and monitor incoming traffic and analytical information.

Radian6

Social media is one of the best tools that B2B marketers can use for lead generation. By monitoring Twitter, forums and online communities, you can seek out not only what people are saying about your client, but you can find people in need of a solution that your client or company can offer.

Radian6 is a really comprehensive monitoring tool that can scan blogs, comments, public Facebook Pages, Twitter and other sources that you feed it. You can then get real-time updates pushed to your dashboard so that you can follow-up or reach out to a potential customer. Radian6 can integrate with Salesforce.com, meaning you can create new contacts or leads in Salesforce directly from the Radian6 dashboard.

Facebook was the most visited site on the web for the week ending on March 13, 2010, surpassing even Google in week-long stats for the first time in history, according to Hitwise. The shift in user habits and audience targeting is palpable and it provides marketers, brand managers, issue advocates, and political campaigns today with an age old choice: Adapt and change or face irrelevance and extinction.

Facebook users are openly sharing their life’s passions, personal interests, and their affinity –- or lack thereof –- for corporate brands, political candidates, and the key public policy stances. In effect, they are openly sharing every bit of marketing data a 21st century company covets.

For those still wary of change but now ready to dip their toe into the waters and begin to understand and benefit from the power of social, there are three free and relatively painless steps to begin the journey through the social media maze:

• First, evaluate your current advertising efforts and identify how they can best be tailored to Facebook. Consider allocating 10% of your current Google AdWords or online advertising budget to a 90-day trial run on Facebook. Be sure to develop clear benchmarks for success, and remember, unlike Google AdWords, Facebook ads rely on both keywords and a variety of demographic information –- information you no doubt have already identified as key indicators of your target audience(s). You can now put this information to use to further micro-target your advertising buy, narrow the net you are throwing in the online marketplace, and increase the return on your investment.
• Second, conduct a survey of your employees to see who is already on Facebook and thus, who may be your company’s most social media-savvy employees. You may find that your workplace is brimming with talent just waiting to be unleashed. For now, these future brand ambassadors may be ideal candidates to develop your Facebook presence and initial advertising program.
• Finally — and this may seem obvious — become a face on Facebook yourself. Become familiar with the site, its features and the value hundreds of millions of people find in the world’s most populous online community. It may ultimately not be for you personally, but as with almost every new platform, the best way to understand its value is to give it a try yourself.

For those still looking for meaning in the numbers released earlier this month, the message is clear: Not only has the cheese moved again, the entire creamery has up and relocated. It won’t be coming back. And no manner of hemming and hawing is going to change that fact.

First, Sysomos examined the 5.2 billion Twitter friendships (the number of friend and follower relationships) to determine how connected users are with each other. And based on this, Sysomos discovered that Twitter is mostly a network with only five degrees of separation, with nearly everyone on Twitter just five steps (or friends, i.e. people you follow) away from each other.

According to the report, 41% of Twitter users have five degrees of separation between each other – meaning nearly everyone within Twitter is only five steps away. And many Twitter users are more closely connected; 37% of users have only four degrees of separation with each other. And 13% of users have six degrees of separation between each other.

Sysomos also examined the reachability of Twitter users, looking at the percentage of Twitter users that can be touched by reaching out a certain distance. Using the Twitter network graph, Sysomos reports that a Twitter user will encounter 83% of all other Twitter users by visiting everyone’s friends up to a distance of five steps. If the user visits all friends of friends up to six steps, 96% of all Twitter users will be covered.

In terms of local connectivity, Sysomos discovered that it only takes 3.32 steps to find someone who is following you (with a standard deviation of 1.25 friendship distances). This mean that if you trace your friends on Twitter (the people you follow) and their friends and so on, in 3.32 steps on average you will discover a follower of your own.

The interconnectivity on Twitter isn’t particularly surprising. Interconnectivity between strangers on the web in general has been increasing thanks to social networking. It’s also important to note the fact that relationships on Twitter are nonreciprocal (someone can follow you without you following back). This might explain why it takes fewer degrees to be connected on the microblogging network. In the real world relationships are two-way, similar to Facebook. Stalkers don’t really count.

Facebook already shows you your possible connections through suggested friends. And Cruxlux does this for you across connections on the web.

Post content from techcrunch.com

So begins a stange weekend.

Within 12 hours I’m sitting on a plane in Terminal 4 of Heathrow courtesy of Continental Airlines! What nice folks they are to give me a freebie flight for my troubles too!

Having arrived in New Jersey I hit New York City the following day chilling in Central Park, and avoiding the Rabies infected animals which apparently inhabit the area.

I also bumped into the “Fear Promotion Initiative” who have the lovley job of walking around telling people that “Any strager you meet could want to murder/rob you!?”.
Nice! Here’s their sign in Central Park:

I also hit the Apple store which was FULL of over 1000 Apple fanboys salivating over the new iPads. I can’t stand Apple users as 99.9% of them blindly love their Mac without actually knowing why they love it.

You can see all my pics from the day on my Facebook Album.

As a bonus to the weekend I managed to extend my week to accomodate a very productive visit to PHD Virtual and some other clients on the East Coast!