You must be living in a vacuum if aren’t aware of the buzz surrounding the latest Old Spice videos that have gone viral. Earlier this week on Facebook, I responded to a question posed by Social Fresh about whether or not the viral ads will sell more Old Spice.

Will the Old Spice viral video campaign sell more Old Spice? Yes or No?

Here was my response:

Of course it will. As consumers we may not realize it consciously.

But, when standing in the aisle in front of all the brands – even if you are loyal to another brand – you will see Old Spice. Don’t think for a second that this is not a coordinated retail effort.

Pay close attention to product placement in the next few weeks – Is there more end cap placements for Old Spice, more Signage, etc. What may seem like a social only event – is certainly tied to a set of specific retailing strategies at the store level. The brand owner of OLD Spice is a former Proctor and Gamble exec. More will be sold. Lots more. ·

Correction: At the time, I posted the comment, I failed to remember that OLD Spice is a Proctor and Gamble brand.  – So better said:

Remember, the brand of owner of Old Spice IS a Proctor and Gamble executive. What does P&G do? BUILD BRANDS.

An effort that started with a commercials during in the Super Bowl,

Old Spice Super Bowl Ad

is much more thought through than the blogosphere is giving Old Spice credit for. This is a well planned, coordinated, measured effort to increase revenue.

Remember, this is P&G we are talking about!

What does P&G do?

BUILD BRANDS.

There are a lot of super smart, creative, innovative and intelligent marketers in this world. Nothing that is happening with Old Spice brand right now is happening by chance. Nothing. Market share, and more importantly, MIND share is be gained every day.

I’m thinking this was dreamed up in late 2008, early 2009. Read this Fast Company article about Old Spice’s Brand Manager, Alex Keith, and you will see why.

BY: EVAN WEST May 1, 2009

In a few short months, we will see the same come true in B2B marketing. My bet is that SAP has some super things in the works. Have you seen SAP’s Facebook Friend Optimizer? I bet they have much more on the way. Watch them. Here is an interesting interview with William Robb, Director, Social Media Marketing for SAP. SAP will be a B2B brand that continues making waves in the social web.

Remember, the recession slowed everything down. The creative juices are following everywhere. I am excited for the future of B2B marketing, are you?

For the past 3 months, the answer has been “BtoB.” But after much consideration, (and yes only seven weeks after site launch), I realize now I made a branding error in launching and naming the site, “BtoBbloggers.” While the terms are interchangeable, “B2B” is the more generally accepted use to represent business to business.

I found myself in a constant battle to fight my natural tendency to use “B2B” when writing the name of the site. Add to that, shortly after launch, I quickly found when copy editing and proofing posts for the site, I was spending far too much time changing all the B2Bs to BtoBs for reasons of consistency.

There were reasons (that I won’t bore you with) that led me to initially choose “BtoB”, but from this point forward, the site and our Twitter account will be known as B2Bbloggers.

A couple of final notes:

• Brilliantly Twitter allows you to change your username without any affect on your followers, friends, mentions, DMs etc.

• Tweetmeme, the company behind the Retweet button, thus far it’s not quite as slick as Twitter. As when we changed domains, all our Retweet counts have be reset. I am working to get those restored, but it’s looking like we are back to starting with zeros (glad I made this decision now).

• Name changes for the Facebook fan page and LinkedIn groups will be reviewed in the coming days.

• You now have one more character to Tweet with when you feel compelled to hit retweet on one of our posts.

Onward and upward – Jeremy