Unfortunately, I followed the link to the original article and found the numbers to be a little suspect. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying anyone is providing intentionally false numbers, but I will say the original post makes a couple of assumptions that most people wouldn’t.

Here’s the problem:  The $4.6 million in savings is calculated based on a survey of users of a knowledge repository. The users claim an average of 12 seconds saved per search. The post then multiplies those 12 seconds times the huge number of searches done every week (Over 286K–remember, this is IBM so they’re probably hitting this database all the time) to come up with 955 hours saved. That’s the first problem. Those 955 hours are made up of 12 second bits of work that it is assumed will be spent doing something else instead of watching a computer churn through a search. That’s not the way people work.

On Twitter I compared this to a company forcing employees to wear zippers on their coats instead of buttons because it saves 12 seconds to take a coat off and on with a zipper instead of buttons. A company with 1000 employees could then claim they saved $552,000 a year based on the aggregated time savings from not buttoning during the six months when coats are required. (See below for the hourly rate I used to figure that out.) That’s not even really an accurate comparison since you really could use 12 seconds not buttoning a coat to do something else. Waiting for a computer to churn through a search still requires your computer, i.e. the tool you’re using, to be occupied. But you get the point.

The second issue is that the 955 hours per week are then said to equal “roughly” $4.6  million in savings. By my calculation, that means that every person making a search is earning over $191,000. ($4.6 million divided by 955 hours x 52 weeks a year.) That’s a pretty high median income. I’m betting it’s based on the average billable hour for a consultant from IBM since it comes close to $92/hour. But that’s the problem: I have to make some assumptions to get to $4.6 million.

What is really interesting about the original post, and the savings claim they make on behalf of bookmarking, is that they mention the system they instituted the program on was not very well liked. By adding tags, standard taxonomy, etc. to it they made it more efficient and more user friendly. As I said, I’ve built things like this before and the changes they put in place are usually considered just good organization of a document system. So it seems to me they’re making the claim that doing the work right saved time over the way it had been done. To me that seems as though they are trying to use work done the wrong way as a benchmark for work done the right way. That’s like claiming you saved time by not getting lost.

As I said, I would love nothing more than the $4.6 million claim to be true, and I’m afraid it will now be a part of social media lore that gets quoted over and over. That’s too bad and won’t help with the perception that social media is not serious about numbers.

PLEASE NOTE: If I’m reading the blog posts wrong, or if the assumptions are clarified/explained somewhere, please let me know. This post has been hastily written and I’m not trying to be combative. I also do not want to imply that blogging and social bookmarking are not great knowledge-sharing tools. They are. I just don’t think they should be oversold with numbers that might not meet the sniff test.  I would love to discuss this with anyone and figure out what the numbers mean. And if no one disputes my numbers, and you use the $4.6 million in a presentation where I’m in the audience, expect to see me during the Q&A asking how they arrived at the numbers.

At this point I’m holding to my earlier opinion that it’s simply too soon to tell how the Old Spice social media campaign has affected their shower gel sales. As I’ve stated many times here and elsewhere, the real measure of social media success if it is to be accepted as a “real” marketing channel is how it affects revenue. There are lots of sides to take in this debate (well, there’s my side and then the wrong side), but I think figuring out if filming 186 YouTube videos makes a difference in sales is a pretty important exercise for P&G. Anyone who says otherwise, or who is saying it doesn’t while using bad data without checking it out first, may be pushing an agenda that has little to do with the merits of the actual effort. I’ll get to that in a second.

What prompted this post is an article from Advertising Age that came out today. What’s interesting is that their numbers seem to be coming from the same source (Symphony IRI) that BrandWeek (and then Yahoo) got their numbers; and yet they show that even with the caveats I mentioned in my earlier post, the Old Spice Guy is helping shower gel sales and market share. I don’t have access to the full report, but I can’t figure out how BrandWeek/Yahoo could come up with a story that says the Old Spice Guy is a bit of a failure using the same data that AdAge says shows Old Spice “consistently gaining market share.” Something isn’t right.

So why is all of this important? Why am I spending this much time on the data and its interpretation and not the campaign itself? Let me answer that second question first. The ad campaign is getting plenty of coverage elsewhere. Go use your google muscles and you’ll find lots to ponder on everything from the making of the campaign to Isaiah Mustafa himself. All good stuff, but I’m not really about that, now am I?

What is more striking to me is how quickly the “Old Spice Fails” meme spread around social media chatterers and how fast it became “conventional” wisdom. I saw snarky comments popping up almost within minutes of the Yahoo post. I read the post, noted the issues with the data, and assumed that someone somewhere would defend the social media campaign on something more than creative arguments. But all I saw was “A for effort” posts.

I couldn’t figure it out until I realized that many trashing the Old Spice campaign have a vested interest in keeping social media nebulous. They like the idea that it’s somehow a new and different form of marketing where a specialized skillset separates them from traditional marketing types.  Along comes a very calculated effort based on creating solid, funny content and it simply has to be squashed (or at least devalued). It’s the exact opposite of the “no one knows what makes a meme go viral” ethos and the “content is dead/long live curation” stuff. What’s more, the campaign came out of a traditional agency, not some specialty shop set up to navigate the intricacies of the social media universe. (Here‘s a good AdWeek article on the digital/traditional divide as it relates to Old Spice.)

I am certain there will be lots written about the Old Spice social media campaign. (Probably some of it by me!) But one thing that may be overlooked is how quickly many social media experts either wanted the campaign to fail, or how spreading that idea demonstrated how many of them don’t really know what they’re talking about when it comes to measuring success.

Many thanks to Eddy Badrina (his blog here or follow him on Twitter @eddybadrina) and Ross Kimbarovsky (his blog here or follow him on Twitter @rosskmbarovsky). I found the AdAge article through Eddy and the AdWeek article through Ross. They’re good guys and I recommend you follow both of them. (Heed my words!)

UPDATE: Fixed the link to the AdAge article.

This may have to be quick, since I want to do this before I forget it, but simply put: you’re wrong about Old Spice. (More links to come later.)

If you’re retweeting the Yahoo post (here) referencing a BrandWeek article about how Old Spice sales are down despite the great social ads featuring Isaiah Mustafa in a towel (aka The Old Spice Guy) then you’re not looking at the numbers closely enough. There seem to be some serious issues with the BrandWeek data as far as I can tell. As I tweeted this morning, here’s where I see some problems:

1 – The numbers do NOT come from Proctor & Gamble but from an analyst firm. I have no reason to doubt the numbers are fairly accurate, but “fairly” is a word that can cover a multitude of sins. What does make me wonder about them, however, is issue #2

2 – Walmart numbers are excluded from the data. I’m not an old CPG hand, but I would think Walmart (y’know, the world’s largest retail company) could skew figures considerably in either direction and affect the data set. Plus, I’d bet Walmart’s shoppers (who are ridiculously hard to pin down demographically regardless of what you might think) tend to be above average Old Spice buyers. (That’s a total hunch with no data, but it makes sense.)

3 – The numbers are for a 52 week period ending June 13th. The viral component of the campaign only began on July 14th. (I may be off by a day or two, but it was well after June 13th.) I would have said the numbers were too soon to draw conclusions even if they ended a day after the social media effort, since not everyone ran out of shower gel on the same day and it isn’t something you run out and buy spur-of-the-moment. But the fact that the numbers end well before the ‘second wave’ of social videos featuring the Old Spice guy makes them almost meaningless.

So before you begin dismantling the viral campaign as an “epic fail,” maybe you should check out this from PR Week on July 21st. It says JULY sales to date (as in the month containing the actual viral efforts) are UP 107%. And these are numbers coming directly from P&G (as in the folks who actually know).

I’ll come back and fix links, add some pics  and some clarifications to this post later, but I wanted to get this up right way.  Feel free to comment.

Now I’m on a horse…

Photo Credit: Michelanglo. It’s Isaiah from the Sistine Chapel. It’s funny. Oh, shut up.

UPDATE (already?!): I’ll do some follow-ups on this post. I’m also digging out some old posts I did after the Skittles social media campaign. It seems like what I said then is still apropos now.

UPDATE II: Added the pic and made some spelling fixes. My original post was rife with typos but I did it quickly lest anyone think I was late to the party on this topic. I hate to be a tooter of my own horn, but I was actually pointing this stuff out as soon as the Yahoo post came out (I admit to not seeing the Brandweek article) and the social media ‘mavens’ began pushing the “Old Spice Guy Fails” meme. I was actually surprised that meme caught on the way it did.

UDATE III: My new post on this topic here. BrandChannel has a more in depth look at the numbers here that echoes some of what I said in my post. It looks like I was right. (Woo hoo!) Some discussion on the BrandChannel numbers with lots of insights from Stephen Denny here. (Follow him on Twitter @note_to_cmo.)

I ran across this factoid today on Twitter (H/T @marc_meyer): Australian courts have said distributing legal documents via Facebook is acceptable. I had no idea. After doing some additional research, I found that New Zealand (New Zealander? Zealandish?) and Canadian courts have also ruled that posting a document to a Facebook account is fine. (Link here.) US courts have not held that to be the case, but the idea that Facebook–a for-profit, American, public company run by non-elected employees with their own set of interests, ideas and agenda–should be placed in the position of distributing legal documents in any country just doesn’t seem smart to me.

I’m sure some would think that’s a little overboard; after all, why should Facebook be any different than UPS or Fedex or a bicycle messenger or a process server in distributing legal documents? In principle, I don’t disagree with that. But then I ran across this story that has received very little notice in the press. That’s right, Facebook was socked with a $9.5 million judgment in a class action suit for divulging user’s private information through its misguided (and now defunct) Beacon project. And these are the folks that should be handling legal documents?

This is in no way an attempt to single out Facebook or its employees as irresponsible or bad. Someone made a boneheaded decision and Facebook is being asked to pay for it. But the payment is being made through a civil proceeding, not criminal, so it means that consumers were responsible for policing this part of the social networking world. (Sadly, the affected class of consumers are getting next to nothing while class action attorneys, as is usually the case, are getting about a third of the judgment. Nice.)

I’m no fan of criminalizing everything, and I don’t know that a criminal case against Facebook would have yielded any better results or encouraged Facebook to rethink its privacy standards. These two cases simply underscore my growing feeling that it is up to consumers to be vigilant in monitoring their online presence and the data that is being used to define them more and more. I’m going to revisit this topic in my next post because the sheer volume of data that is collected, analyzed and distributed is mind boggling. Don’t worry, it’s not an anti-big-brother screed. In fact, I think consumers are now better positioned to understand and control their ‘data fates’ than ever before.

There’s a new sheriff in town and that sheriff is us…

(And before you send me an email that the correct usage is ‘we,’ don’t bother. I know. I’m just paraphrasing the famous saying. Relax, ok?)

First some background: “Personal brands” is a subject about which many social media mavens love to wax philosophic. Just like a brand message for a product, it’s the bundle of qualities and characteristics that your online presence projects. In short, it’s the various answers to the question “What is Person X all about?” And just like a corporate brand, it has real value, especially to those who look to their online personal brand to help them with professional and career advancement.

A friend of mine who spends a lot of time considering personal brands (he’s a recruiter) recommended sticking to a few networks, like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. That struck me as almost counterintuitive. I’m already on those sites, but why not put my stuff out on a few more. No harm, right? From a PR perspective, it’s all about presence. Yet here is a recruiter saying it’s possible to over-extend. Why? Because social media is different from PR in that it’s not all about projecting a presence. It’s about relationships, and relationships are as much about listening as they are about talking. (Somewhere my wife just had an urge to say “duh!”) I can’t maintain a relationship everywhere and hope to provide updated content, feedback and responses. On those sites where my presence is lacking attention, I do myself a disservice by seeming disengaged.

There are all sorts of discussions to be had about social media and personal brands. How do you create them? How do you expand them? How do you protect them? I have come across a ton of people who are self-proclaimed experts on creating and sustaining a personal brand. Some are completely full of themselves, but others make good sense and I’m fascinated by the entire phenomenon. After all, it’s about people taking control of the online reputations that are coming to define them more and more.

And here’s my follow-up question: What does this mean for the social media sites themselves? How does the market determine where people congregate and where they simply abandon a network? Is their an online equivalent to the old real estate adage about location, location, location? How will this play out for these companies once people begin to sense that their social networks are basically located in a bad neighborhood? Is there room for all of them? We’re all buzzing about social media at the moment, but how soon before we start hearing about social networking sites closing down or migrating somewhere else? It’s a mean old world right now. Doesn’t something have to give?

Reed’s Law says the value of a social network scales exponentially with the number of its members. If members begin to leave, is there a tipping point where the value diminishes exponentially as well? Will people abandon a network because they just don’t perceive any value to themselves or their personal brand? How do networks that see that behavior in their members react? Do they rebrand? Do they become niche networks, something like “the network of left-leaning European pop artists,” or just whither away?

I just tweaked some tools on this blog last week and redid the plug-in that allows readers to post content on their network pages. It had a list of social networks that was huge, literally dozens of sites, many of which I had never heard of. Someone feels it’s necessary to make these sites available via a coded link, so obviously there are people using them. Is that how they all will survive. Will they end up being so linked together through API’s and shared authentications that users barely know when they’ve crossed into another network, and updates migrate out to various parts of their online brand automatically. All I know at this point is that keeping an eye on content at more than a few places is time-consuming and difficult. I’ll hope that some smart coder figures out how to keep it all updated and relevant. If that same coder can figure out how to make me sound smarter, funnier and more accomplished, that would be great too.

That being said, I’ve been going back through a lot of old posts about social media, and I am struck by all the praise for some marketing efforts that don’t seem to deserve it. For instance, recently a quick service restaurant ran a giveaway on their Facebook fan page. It was a pretty sizeable prize and attracted some good attention once the giveaway went viral. The company was patted on the back for increasing their fan following to several hundred thousand. Unfortunately, when the same company ran a campaign several months later aimed at those fans, asking for them to actually do something other than sign up, the campaign was a flop. Everyone knows where I’m going with this: It’s easy to attract followers when you’re giving something away, but harder when you require something in return.

As far as social media is concerned, and the self-appointed gods who rule it, it’s all about “building trust” and “creating relationships.” (Or maybe it’s creating trust and building relationships. Whatever.) You accomplish those goals, they say, by “listening to your network.” They tell you that social media is all about a two-way conversation with your connections. But what if your connections are simply saying, “Give me something. Free.” And what if that something they want you to give them is what you normally charge good money for. When do you draw the line? If all you’re doing is giving something away, at some point aren’t you either a slut or a sucker? And if you don’t give anything away, when do you cross the line to being a tease or a money-grubbing whore? (Sorry for the metaphors.)

I’m not sure I have a great answer, and that’s because I still think we’re at the front end of using social media as a productive marketing channel. I think it’s also because we’re still at the point where we’re looking at social media as some sort of distinct, special and sexy marketing channel, instead of being an integrated part of our communications strategies. Social media has the feel of something that can go viral and gain immediate attention. We assume, wrongly, that digital channels produce results quickly if done right. But attention isn’t the same as results. In that way, social media is more like traditional database and direct marketing. It takes time and effort to build up a good core database of customers and prospects, and that database has to be consistently and constantly cared for. It has to be analyzed, mined, tracked and cleaned. There is no quick way to do it. Anyone who believes there is will find out how fickle those followers and fans are when they find that the freebies have dried up.

After all, if social media is all about building solid relationships, and for all my criticism of the self-proclaimed experts who say so, I believe it is (though that’s hardly the earth-shaking revelation many of those experts believe it to be) Solid relationships, as any good touchy-feely couples therapist will tell you, are based on trust. And trust, those same folks will tell you, is the product of consistency and time. When people know you will consistently do the same thing over and over, they make the assumption that you will continue to do the same thing the next time. That works for people and companies.

I’ll be coming back to the campaign I mentioned above, because in many ways I think it actually had a negative effect at the end of the day. For now, suffice it to say that viral campaigns that quickly increase social media networks may make for a good story. They may make the marketing people who dreamed them up feel great. But if I can stick with my previous metaphor, in the end, are those hook-ups healthy relationships?