By now you’ve seen “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” TV ad campaign, featuring Isaiah Mustafa, that pulled the Old Spice brand back from the brink of irrelevance and effectively restoring it to the #1 spot in market share.

The campaign launched in February during Superbowl XLIV and by the time Procter & Gamble’s Global Marketing Officer Marc Pritchard described its success at the ANA Conference in October, Old Spice had generated 1.8 billion PR impressions (globally) and an incredible explosion of online engagement with a 2,700% increase in Twitter followers, 800% increase in Facebook fans, 300% increase in website traffic, and over 140 million YouTube views (collectively). All this translated into double digit sales.

When Cisco decided to introduce its new Aggregated Services Router (ASR) exclusively online to reach their target audience (network engineers), the news itself attracted a great deal of media attention. But when the official campaign numbers came out, there were plenty of latte spit-takes from all, even the “gurus” of social media-dom. Here are just some of the highlights:

• 9,000 people attended the social media product launch event (90 times more attendees than in the past)
• Nearly three times as many press articles than traditional outreach methods
• More than 1,000 blog posts and 40 million online impressions
• One-sixth the cost of a traditional launch (shaving over $100,000 off its launch expenses)

Cisco’s use of social media and gaming channels for its product launch is a shining example of online marketing done right. No newbie to social media, Cisco was not shy leveraging its 22 blogs, 300+ YouTube channels, 100,000+ Facebook fans, or 2 million Twitter followers. Cisco developed content specific to the launch, including a social media widget, a 3D game, and a virtual concert in Second Life featuring eight rock bands.

I was going to aggregate all the details of this case study here but then found Casey Hibbard’s superb post on Social Media Examiner. No point reinventing the wheel so here is the full monty on Cisco’s B2B Social Media Case Study. Enjoy!

If you love stats and NYC then you should be following Crain’s New York Business to get your daily dose of metrics about The City.

#followfriday #ff #b2b #nyc B2B Marketing Posse follows: @CrainsNewYork @StatsAndTheCity

A World of Tweets shows real-time tweets from around the world in visually appealing heatmap. The more tweets, the “hotter” the area appears. You can even view the map in 3D Stereo (red/blue paper lens glasses not included).

Developed by Carlo Zapponi and Andreas Markdalen at frog design (Milan) using HTML5. The geolocation data is made possible by the Twitter Streaming API and the Yahoo! Placemaker service.

We have been anticipating the release of Twitter Analytics since the company acquired Smallthought Systems (makers of Dabble DB and Trendly) back in June. Now it appears that Twitter has started inviting a select group of users to test their new Twitter Analytics dashboard.

It is unclear exactly when the rest of us will have access but Evan Williams and gang have hinted at sometime this year. I use a combination of tools such as TweetDeck, SocialOomph, TweetGrader, TweetStats, and Klout, to manage and measure my clients’ Twitter accounts so it will be interesting to see how these tools fair against the source.

Along with Promoted Tweets, this was the logical next step and may prove to be a real money maker for Twitter.