Old Spice Takes YouTube and Twitter by Storm, Answers Kevin Rose, Alyssa Milano

Old Spice is taking viral marketing to a whole new level with a barrage of YouTube responses to various Hollywood celebrities, tech personalities and even regular folks who ask questions on Twitter. The Old Spice guy, as he has come to be known, whom you may remember from the hilarious Old Spice ads that went viral earlier this year, has been posting YouTube videos and tweeting about them at a furious pace. In the past day or so he has posted well over 100 video responses, most of them, if not all, done on the spot.

It took most of the ones targeted by surprise, to say the least, but it’s all part of a very well engineered and very original campaign. Fittingly, Old Spice is also a Promoted Trend on Twitter. The irony is that it probably would have been a trending topic anyway and the Promoted Tweet that shows up on top of search results for “Old Spice” is also listed organically as a Top Tweet having received over 100 retweets.

The videos target well-known celebrities but also bloggers and people like Kevin Rose, Digg’s cofounder and CEO, and Biz Stone, Twitter’s cofounder and CEO. Even Anonymous, the group associated with 4chan is mentioned. Of course, all of them have a huge number of followers and the attention they provide goes a long way towards the success of the campaign. But it doesn’t take away from the brilliance of the move. At one point the Old Spice guy, real name Isaiah Mustafa, even responds to his own tweet.

And it seems to be working, the videos for Kevin Rose, Perez Hilton and others have over 100,000 views already and most videos have tens of thousands. The video uploads have stopped a few hours ago, even the Old Spice guy has to sleep, but it should be interesting to see if they continue.