You CAN Teach an Old Spice New Tricks!

“I’m on a horse.“

Those are the words that turned the once-stale Old Spice brand into something refreshing and new. The folks at Proctor and Gamble, who make Old Spice, took it a step further last week when they launched an Old Spice Guy response campaign, creating dozens of personalized responses to the tweets, emails and Facebook posts from his many fans, including George Stephanopolous (presidential abs!) and Alyssa Milano.

Marshall Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb did a bang up job giving us a behind the scenes look at how the campaign worked. At this point, I have to confess that I’ve watched every one of the videos. Between that and the media overload about the ab-tastic spokesman, I’ve been thinking a lot about what a campaign like this means, especially for nonprofits. Like the Red Cross text message campaign and any one of the Humane Society Facebook fundraisers before it, I’m certain this is a campaign the sector will be dying to replicate. So, what can we learn?

Your campaign has to be one, if not both of the following: funny and immediate.

Extremely hilarious things go viral, we know this. We haven’t collectively watched cat in a fishbowl over ONE MILLION TIMES because it’s socially relevant.

Funny is not enough, though.