Old Spice Guy: The Internet duel of the century

Image found here.
This is what the genius marketer must have thought:

Put a bare-chested, deep-voiced, over-the-top ladies man in a bath towel promoting deodorant on video and voila; I've got myself the perfect ingredients for the most epic ad campaign ever.

And he was right.

It started with the Old Spice Twitter feed: “Today could be just like the other 364 days you log into Twitter, or maybe the Old Spice man shows up”, when everyone could ask questions to Isaiah Mustafa, or better known as The Old Spice Guy, and he would make 30-second videos to answer anything you ever wanted to know.

Up until recently, The Old Spice Guy was being ‘replaced’ by his long-blond haired evenly muscled alter ego Fabio, or better: The New Old Spice Guy. But when The Old Spice Guy found out, all hell broke loose. And so the ultimate ridiculous popularity battle of all time began, called ‘Old Spice Guy Mano a Mano Fabio in El Baño’, in battle arena Internet.

People from all over the world send in questions like “@OldSpice I challenge you to a laser cat duel. Are you manly enough to duel with laser cats?” resulting in a series of hilarious video replies which have literally nothing to do anymore with deodorant whatsoever (see the reply below).

The fierce battle proceeds as I’m blogging this, so follow the battle live on foot (click here) and make sure to get answers to anything you’ve always wanted to know!

Google’s own Facebook: Google+

Image found here.
A silent watcher. That’s what they call it. As I’m lurking in offline mode, checking out who’s having dinner with whom, in which restaurant, what the lobster soup taste and look like, and how the rain poured down on their way to it, I just can’t help myself thinking why on earth I would want to know any of that.

And yet, I do, and with me 750 million others. That’s when Google decided: “I want Facebook too”, and launched Google+. Currently only available upon invitation, Google+ tries to beat Facebook by making their platform more like the real life, by introducing Circles, Sparks, and Hangouts.

Circles enables a user to share certain things with certain people only who are in their ‘circle’. Sparks picks out interesting content from the web based on your preferences, similar to Stumbleupon. And Hangouts, what Google calls ‘the next best thing apart from teleportation’, attempts to simulate being in a social environment like a party, where you meet friends by chance.

A smart move of Google, to let the users do the work for them by letting them put the right contacts in the right circles. However, it still isn’t perfect. For example when you share content within a circle, everyone else in that circle knows who you’ve shared it with. That's not always preferable, as with CC and BCC in email.

And that’s exactly what the invitation only policy is for, to get feedback and improve it before the Grand Launch. And so the war in social media land gains another giant player. With already over 2 million members in the first two weeks, things looks pretty promising for Google+. Meanwhile, Facebook announced to launch new product improvements, including the recently leaked out iPad Facebook app.

“I liked Google+ when it was still called Facebook” is what you’ll hear more often these days. Which brings us to the question whether there is still room for another social media platform. And also, how much more will Google get to know about our lives, if it doesn’t already know everything that is.