In case you’ve been living under a social media rock for the past 48 hours, Old Spice has launched the current mother-of-all viral social media campaigns.

Apparently, they’ve assembled a crack creative team and locked them in a Portland, Oregon bunker with cameras, a shower and a live internet connection to answer questions posted at various social media sites.

When I first sat down to write this, I thought I was going to poke all sorts of holes in it. Yeah, a big company with a well established character & brand could do this sort of thing with deep pockets, but it really doesn’t do any good for the little guys. Local businesses could never pull this sort of thing off.

But why not?

I mean, yeah, you couldn’t do it on this sort of scale cranking out 87 videos in 11 hours that get national attention, but how about on a micro scale?

Maybe one a week?

With some sort of interesting delivery?

Educating & informing your potential customer base instead while entertaining them?

It could be done.

But you’ve got to have something of value and be interesting first.

Clickbrix QR Codes for Real Estate: via Brand Flakes for Breakfast

QR Codes are nifty little things. I’ve even spotted a few  in the wild locally in Wilmington and we spotted them in a few places around Washington, DC while we were on vacation.

Basically, they are bar codes that can be read by smartphone users. The information that they can contain varies, but the really cool application is that you can use them to direct smartphone users to a web page. Realty companies in the area are starting to use them on for sale signs to direct potential buyers to listings and I’ve seen them at Lowes linking to information on plants & plant care.

They’ve been around in Japan for a while now, but you can generate your own with one of several online tools. Put them in your ads, on business cards or on various items in your store and lead customers to more information to complete the sale.

A client called me last week about re-shooting a video his friend shot for him. I knew I should try to sell him on the fact that I could make it look better, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

Why?

I didn’t really think he needed to re-do it.

You see, he’s this really nice gentleman that hand makes turkey calls. They’re beautiful. In this world of slick plastic produced by borderline slave labor, he makes each of these things by hand. There’s a real art & craft to what he does. It’s not high tech. It is very low tech, but it has this human element to it that makes it rare.

He sells them for far less than what they are worth.

The video is DIY, very much like what he does and for that reason, it fits him. But, it also *works*. It shows his calls and how they work. You can hear the sounds and if you have a trained ear you can appreciate how effortlessly he’s producing these sounds.

He’s already had 350+ views on his video and it’s helped him sell calls. I could make it look better, but I doubt that it would make it more effective.

And so I talked him out of it.

Yes, I’m a horrible salesman, but I hope that it’s because I’m more concerned for my clients than my own bottom line.

No post production on this!

(via: adverbox)

I do a lot of social media. I’ve got accounts set up on just about every major social media site I could find, but I concentrate mainly on Twitter and Facebook. I don’t do a lot of shameless self-promotion not because I think it’s evil, but because I find it to be a personal turn-off. God didn’t wire me to be P.T. Barnum and it turns my stomach to see half-truths thrown out in the name of marketing.

Then I start getting followers on Twitter. They’re linking and pimping and demanding that I act NOW! There’s so many of them and, gee, they seem to be doing pretty well. Maybe I should do a little of that?

But I find a scrap of wisdom in my RSS feeds this morning. A quote from the prophet of social media marketing:

“Either you are on the path of the TV Industrial complex, and you’re prepared to promote and spam and spend and make average stuff for average people… or you are busy embracing the new media for everything it can offer.”

Read More: Seth’s Blog: What to do when the new thing doesn’t work

Ah, Seth, you are my hero.