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If you’ve been unplugged from your favorite social network the past few days, you might have missed one of the most impressive social web campaigns in recent memory. If you’ve been active on Twitter or Facebook, I’m not sure how you could have missed this: Procter & Gamble launched an amazing social campaign to promote their Old Spice body washes.

Combating the notion that body wash is only for ladies and recognizing market research shows that women purchase as much as 70% of the shower gel for men in their households, P&G’s partner agency Wieden & Kennedy based in Portland, Oregon launched the TV campaign in February called “Smell Like a Man, Man.” The commercials feature actor Isaiah Mustafa speaking directly to women of the household while portraying an over-the-top manly man that does not alienate or belittle men, but reaffirms that it’s okay (and even desirable) to be a masculine man.

The original commercial became an Internet phenomenon, already gaining more than 13 million views on YouTube. The Old Spice Man returned a couple weeks ago with a new commercial, and this time popular social networks were seeded with solicitations for users to submit questions for the Old Spice Man.

In the past few days, the Old Spice Man has posted an amazing 184 video responses to the Old Spice YouTube channel. Most of the responses are 30-60 seconds long, and are directed at various individual questions and comments on a variety of social networks. Some are directed at celebrities like Demi Moore and George Stephanopoulos, some at influencers in the digital world like Digg founder Kevin Rose and Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis, and many more at average unknown internet Joes.

These short videos have become amazingly popular, flooding Facebook and Twitter with shared links and retweets, and gaining much more attention as a collective whole than they ever could on their own (although they have individually gained between 25,000 and 340,000 unique views). The real victory is that for at least two days, the entire Internet has been talking about the Old Spice brand.

So what makes this campaign so successful, and what lessons can be extended to your own social campaigns? Here are a few of my observations:

• Respond in Real Time: Social interaction via web exists in the here and now – often something is “old news” in these contexts within a matter of hours. Although the Old Spice Man responses weren’t completely instantaneous, having a professionally created video response from a commercial spokesperson the same day your question was posted is pretty impressive. If nothing else, a quick response communicates one important thing: your brand is listening.
• Engage the Influencers: By responding to and engaging with some of the most influential people in social web, the Old Spice brand quickly became the talk of the Internet. When you engage influencers, they influence others on your behalf. The campaign even went so far as to send real-life flowers to actress Alyssa Milano after a back-and-forth exchange on YouTube. Your target audience may not always be the whole of the Internet like Procter & Gamble, but targeting key influencers in your niche market can help your message spread to your audience quicker.
• Give Community Managers Freedom to Speak for the Brand: If the Old Spice Man video writers had needed to get corporate approval for every video script, there is absolutely no way they could have generated 84 personalized videos in 11 hours on Tuesday (an average of one video every 7 minutes not counting breaks). By trusting those managing your social web presence to speak freely on behalf of the brand, it is much easier for them to respond to individuals quickly and directly – resulting in greater impact for your brand.
• Give the Audience Freedom to Extend the Brand: In response to a popular request on Reddit, the Old Spice Man provided users with the tools to create voicemail messages using his voice, and users used it to create an online voicemail generator. This extended the Old Spice brand to the personal voicemails of their audience, a place they themselves never targeted. By giving the audience access to some of your brand assets, they may extend your message to locations you yourself may have had difficulty reaching.
• Engage the Audience on a Personal Level: Although the sheer volume of requests from the audience for replies far exceeded Old Spice Man’s ability to respond to each of them, his very public responses to individual people (and not just celebrities) made the entire audience feel like they too could get a response. When your audience feels like your brand cares about them personally, they too will personally care about your brand.

The campaign wrapped up Wednesday evening with two response videos that expressed the personal connection that defined the campaign: a touching personal message to Mustafah’s own daugher, and a final farewell specifically thanking all of those who submitted questions and comments that time did not allow responses to.

In less than three days, the 184 YouTube response videos garnered more than 5.2 million views (where the Old Spice channel was the most popular on the site), grew the Old Spice twitter account from around 5,000 followers to over 66,000, and grew the Old Spice Facebook page to more than 592,000 fans.

How can you leverage these same concepts on a scale your brand can afford to grow your own web audience?

While using the Tweetie 2 Twitter client on my iPhone a couple of weeks ago, I realized the app developer saw fit to include the option of using any URL shortening service I might desire if the shortening service provided an appropriate API.

API stands for Application Programming Interface. An API allows software to interact with other software. Twitter clients use the Twitter API to implement features of Twitter and access tweets, Twitter uses the Bit.ly API to shorten links using the Bit.ly service, and we have made creative use of various APIs on sites like Columbus College of Art and Design (which uses the Google Calendar API to power its deep set of event and news listings).

Since dynamIt already has a URL shortener built into our site, all we needed was a suitable API. I was able to use the existing scripting to generate and store the shortened URL, and only needed to adjust how the shortened URL was returned for suitable API use.

TinyURL has set a precedent for the simplest response possible—just the new shortened URL. Try calling the following action in your browser where [URL] is the URL you would like to shorten:

http://dynamit.us/url/api.dT?url=[URL]

The response will be the resulting shortened dynamit.us URL in plain text. You can optionally include the title of the page whose URL you are shortening as well:

http://dynamit.us/url/api.dT?title=[TITLE]&url=[URL]

While this simple plain text response can be interpreted by most applications, some developers may prefer a Bit.ly / JSON style response that looks something like this:

{ "shortUrl": "http://dynamit.us/222" }

If so, just add the URL variable “json=true” to the API call (with or without the optional [TITLE] variable):

http://dynamit.us/url/api.dT?json=true&url=[URL]

The Tweetie 2 application I use on my iPhone will accept either format. In Tweetie 2, go to Settings > Services > URL Shortening > Custom and enter:

http://dynamit.us/url/api.dT?url=%@

Or if you want to use the Bit.ly / JSON format just for fun:

http://dynamit.us/url/api.dT?json=true&url=%@

Tweetie recognizes “%@” as where it should include the URL in the API call. Now whenever I am tweeting from my phone and want to include a URL, Tweetie will automatically use the dynamit.us URL shortener to shorten the link for me!

Are there other places where you might like to use our URL shortener?

UPDATE (5/27/2010): This week, Tweetdeck has added custom URL shortening to v0.34 of their popular desktop client. To enable the dynamIt URL shortener in Tweetdeck, go to Settings > Services. Select “Other” as “the service you wish to use to shorten URLs” and enter the following code in the text box marked “Other URL Shortening Endpoint”:

http://dynamit.us/url/api.dT?url=%@

Recently, we’ve had multiple requests for “print” links and printable versions of web sites. So, I started wondering, with widespread access including mobile, does anyone still print from web?

I posed the following question over twitter the other day: Does anyone actually print websites? If so, what types of sites and how often?

Some of the responses:

@Selicker: I print maps, instructions, and recipes

@noahwesley: I’ll rarely print a blog post/article to read later if I’m going to be bored and w/o laptop.

@fricto: My wife @owlpoo prints blog posts about cooking and knitting for the recipes/patterns quite a bit.

@beccarkt: yes! For competitive audits for clients and for articles, etc. Probably a couple times a week

So, YES. People still do print from web. They print stuff like, recipes, instructions, maps, long articles, and reports. Frequency seemed to vary-some as often as every few days, others very rarely-but the fact remains, web users still hit Control+P.

But even if not many users are printing from web anymore (which I have concluded is NOT the case), it is still really important to define a stylesheet for print.

It’s not that difficult to do, CSS makes it so easy for us to implement a print-only stylesheet. Sure it takes some more dev time to define layout styles that hide the fluff, ensure high contrast, and size things appropriately. But, that extra time makes your content and site much more accessible and usable.

Here are some dynamIt tips to writing that print stylsheet:

• If you do not already know this here is how to specify the media type for a style sheet:
  <link type=”text/css” rel=”stylesheet” href=”print.css” media=”print” />
• Remove things that don’t need to be seen when printed: navigation, features that do not pertain to the page’s primary content, ads (maybe?). The easiest way to do this is use display: none;
• Make sure that your text-to-background contrast is high. This is essential for readability.
• Do not bother making background images or colors print. People do not print from web for the design, they want content. (See above).
• If you are building from a fixed-pixel width design, keep your printable content around 700 pixels wide or less.
• Don’t forget to test it out by printing (and yes this means printing from IE6, IE7, FF2, FF3, Opera, Safari).

Journalists lead interesting lives, their work takes them to unique places even in the local setting. This is a life that most of us will never know beyond what we see on the news and in the papers.

However, I have found that technology allows us to dig a bit deeper and have a stronger experience than traditional media. Consider this scenario:

Last week dynamIt was interviewed about StartUp Weekend Columbus, which was held over the weekend at TechColumbus. We were talking rather informally with the reporter and the camera man while they setup in our office. We developed a good rapport with the camera man and so I began following him on Twitter (@AndYL_WCMH).

Andy is an avid Twitter user and often tweets (to use the parlance of our times) from his mobile phone while on the job. For example, the day after the dynamIt interview, Andy was down in Cincinnati to shoot an interview with presidential hopeful John McCain. Twitter received periodic updates of the trip, including a few camera phone pics.

Meanwhile, back in the office, I was following along via Twitter, and I could not help but feel almost as if I were there standing right next to Andy as he was at work. When I watched this story on the news I recalled the behind-the-scenes story told by Andy via Twitter. I was captivated by this story because I knew how it came about. I got so much more out of a simple news program because it was supported by web and mobile technology.

Sometimes it seems like the universe of web applications is just too big and busy. This clutter can be distracting and take away from the main goals of web applications- increased efficiency and experience. So, we got the team together and compiled a list of some of the web applications that we actually use – the ones that actually make a difference in everyday experiences and tasks on the web. We hope you enjoy and find some new favorites.

 

Our Picks

Mint – “Being able to see where all your money is going is awesome. Mint is a totally free finance software for those interested in personal finances. Get alerts about payments, balances, unusual spending, everything you can think of. Mint connects to over 5,000 US banks, credit unions, credit card, brokerage, and mutual fund companies to keep your personal finances automatically up to date!”- Phil

 

deviantART- “deviantART is tagged as the largest art community online, providing artists with a way to get their work out there by submitting their personal artwork. As a member you can also tag favorites, follow your favorite artist, comment on other’s artwork or your own, chat, and more. It’s a great place to get a creative spark and chat with like-minded individuals who appreciate art.” – Phil

 

Google Docs & Google Gears - “Google Docs is an entire productivity suite that is completely web based. When I bought my new laptop I decided not to fork over the additional $250 to purchase Microsoft Office. Instead I opted for Google Docs. Google Docs is powerful and you won’t be missing out on anything- it offers a Word Processor (like Word), and Spreadsheet (like Excel), and a Presentation Creator (like PowerPoint). Just create a Google account, sign-in on the Docs homepage, and create a new document. Not only can you do all of the important stuff that you can with MS Office, but there are other features, consequences of it being web-based that make Google Docs even more powerful and flexible. For example,

• You can take it anywhere, all docs are stored online so any computer with internet access allows you to open and edit your documents

• You can invite other users to collaborate on the same document and Google will store all versions.

• You can export to PDF even without purchasing Acrobat Pro.

• You can instantly send the contents of a doc through your Gmail.

Ok…but what if you do NOT have Internet access…you cannot use your word processor, right? Wrong.

This begins the discussion of Google Gears. Google Gears is a lightweight piece of software provided by google that you install on your computer. Once installed you are allowed to use certain Google applications (including Google Docs) in offline mode. Google Docs, in particular, lets you create, store, open, edit document while offline. Then when you get back to a hotspot, simply click a button and your online Google account is synced with your offline Google Gears usage.

Gears works great with Google Reader (which Nick talks about later in this post) as well. You can download feeds and read them while offline. Recently, when on vacation and away from Internet I took all my feeds offline with Gears and was able to read them throughout the trip. Upon my return I synced back up and caught up on everything I missed.” – Bobby

 

Wikipedia -”Wikipedia is a great friend to the researcher and the curious mind. While there are some issues of legitimacy and accuracy you must be aware of, Wikipedia has changed the way I find information. I use it as a starting point (my default search is set to Wikipedia). In this way, it is a connector, a base for research and search. You can read more about my experiences with Wikipedia in my last blog post, Wikipedia: Good or Evil?” – Bobby

 

Jambase – “All you need to keep track of your favorite band and their concert schedules. Register, create a profile with your favorite artists and music types selected, your location, and sit back and wait for concert updates and notifications to come your way. JamBase also has a unique music community, which offers users a wealth of information in the form of CD reviews, concert reviews, and video clips from concerts.” -Steve

 

KeepVid- “Want it, keep it – simple.This is a perfect tool to grab videos from your favorite video sites and keep a copy on your computer. It’s perfect for website videos that are slow to load, or when you just don’t have enough time to watch but want to watch it later.” – Steve

 

Digg- “Real-time user submitted news, links, and pictures. Users can “digg” the submissions, which get them greater exposure and attention from the Digg community. If your story hits the front page, you are likely to be flooded with thousands of hits and priceless exposure. Money.”- Steve

 

 

Evernote – “Evernote just recently launched, but it’s already created a lot of buzz and improved the way I organize things. Think of Evernote as an organization suite, a way to index and sort through all the information you pull in from various sources – magazine excerpts, newspaper articles, pictures, web postings, etc. Evernote then runs all these sources through some powerful recognition technology to index all the various words contained in the images or articles. It’s the best way to catalog all the sources of information you use and see every day into a powerful, dynamic interface that makes searching and organization a breeze.” – Dan

 

Pandora – “Pandora is internet music that creates playlists and stations based on your input. Start off by telling Pandora one of your favorite songs or artists, and it will find similar songs or artists and start streaming them for you. After a short while, Pandora really does get to know you and your music interests, and will provide you with relevant, exciting new music all day long. Try it out, your ears will thank you.” -Dan

Google Reader- ” From Wikipedia, “Google Reader is a Web-based aggregator, capable of reading Atom and RSS feeds online or offline. It was released by Google on October 7, 2005 through Google Labs. Reader graduated from beta status on 17 September 2007.”Google reader allows me to ‘subscribe’ to any site out there that publishes a feed. I can sign into reader, see who has published updated stories and content, how many updates they have and when they were made. It allows me to organize, categorize, share with friends, star for future review and even comment. I read all day every day. Keeping up with news and my industry allows me to suggest the best options for projects. Trying to visit every one of ‘my sites’ every single day to see if they have something new would be impossible. Google Reader is my savior – it coordinates, consolidates and organizes so when I do get a few seconds, I can pick and choose what I want to read.” – Nick

 

Twitter – “Lot’s of hoopla about Twitter recently. I tried it and will take the first step in admitting that I’m addicted. Twitter is a social media piece that allows you to communicate in 140 characters. Where I’ve found it useful is connecting with industry colleagues and people of interest. Participating in and watching conversations all day long allows me to know where people are, what they’re doing and what they’re working on. I also follow the Dispatch, ESPN, NBC4, Experience Columbus and others. Quick updates and headlines that link to stories allow for unobtrusive information and BOOM – I’m up-to-date without breaking my workflow. Note – many companies and even politicians are very active tweeters. You can follow dynamIt on Twitter here, or my Twitter here.” -Nick

 

Gmail-”Gmail is a web-based email client created by Google. It’s similar to most traditional email clients in that it allows you to search, store, categorize and archive email but has a few distinct advantages. By virtue of its web basis, Gmail can be accessed from any browser – it’s useful when I’m on the road (often), away from the office, or at home. Although traditional webmail has been around for ages, Gmail is part of a breed of 2.0 webmail applications. Gmail is rich in features, easy to use, and generally a pleasure to access. It provides the features of a traditional email client without the cost or local installation” – Matt

 

Facebook – “Facebook is truly a web phenomenon and, in many ways, it’s representative of the entire Web 2.0 movement. It has succeeded brilliantly by creating a social environment which has become a vital element of a person’s character and relationships. The Facebook has become a method of self-styled personality, identity and livelihood. It’s truly a resource and allows for a level of digital communication never before available: it is a resource for comprehensive information for friends, acquaintances, and, in some cases, people you may have passed on the street.” – Matt

What would happen if 100 or so like-minded professionals gathered for a weekend in pursuit of converting an idea to a reality? If you are interested in such an experiment, you may be interested in the series of programs known as Startup Weekends. Startup Weekends are 3 day events, seeking to compress processes that usually take months into a long, sleep-deprived weekend. By the end of Friday night, the group decides on an idea to pursue, with the ultimate goal of launching the idea by Sunday night. What happens in the next hours is a mess of excitement, frustration, victories and defeats. It’s quite a process, and it’s memorable to say the least.

Sometimes there is a clear, defined product that launches from the program, but sometimes not. What is most important about these weekends is not the product, but the benefits that such a program can contribute to the community. Startup Weekend is, and always will be, a community-driven experiment that expands and enhances connections. The program first started out in entrepreneurial-minded Boulder, Colorado, and has since taken place in over a dozen cities. I was lucky enough to participate in Bloomington, Indiana Startup Weekend.

How does all of this pertain to dynamIt? Well, Startup Weekend is coming to Columbus (July 18-20), and we are incredibly excited about it. So excited, in fact, that we are helping to sponsor the program by dedicating money and time towards the promotion and execution of the event. TechColumbus, an incredibly progressive and innovative group is at the front of the Columbus weekend, and we are honored to be in partnership with them to allow such a wonderful program to happen in the Capital City. (If you are interested in the tech community in Columbus, make sure to join TechColumbus for member events, programs, and networking).

There is still a limited amount of spaces open for the weekend, and you can register and learn more by visiting the Startup Weekend Columbus Blog. It’s being updated all the time with news and notes as the program nears closer. You can also engage by following the Startup Weekend Columbus Twitter.