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What started as a successful TV commercial, would quickly take social media and the web by storm. I’m talking about Isaiah Mustafa, the Old Spice Guy. Let’s take a look at the success of the Old Spice campaign, by breaking down their social media plan.

Since the Old Spice television commercials were beginning to receive some attention, Proctor & Gamble – with their ad agency Weiden + Kennedy – teamed up with social media experts to shift the buzz from television to web. They wanted to take their character, the Old Spice Guy, and bring him to life by using existing social media channels in real time. A group of writers and experts set up in a film studio and monitored various social networks to find questions from different social community members. They chose who to answer according to each user’s influence on social media networks. Then, after filming Mustafa’s response to those questions, the team used Twitter to link users to the personalized, YouTube videos.

They created a number of interactive messages to regular fans, as well as to celebs and bloggers like actress Alyssa Milano and Digg founder Kevin Rose. Each message was carefully crafted, targeting the individual user with a specific tone. The campaign didn’t just work; it reached a whole new level of success. One tweeter even asked Mustafa to propose to his girlfriend for him through a real-time video. Within the hour, a video of the Old Spice Guy proposing was posted, to which the tweeter soon replied, “She said yes!” Watch the video here.

When each video response was posted, the user who received the answer was named directly in the tweet. This allowed Old Spice to further connect with their audience on an individual level. Their videos balanced humor with surprise and remained consistent with the television commercials, but refrained from mentioning the product repetitively to avoid overloading viewers.

The campaign flooded the internet. Many people – not just those mentioned in the videos – began sharing links to the YouTube responses throughout their personal social networks. Old Spice had found a way to encourage users to interact with their brand. They developed a campaign that not only created a two-way dialogue with audiences in real time, but also generated awareness about their product through social media user conversations. An article by Mashable sums up the campaign quite well, saying, “This is the future of marketing.”

To see how the commercials were made, watch this video.