On Tuesday, July 13 Old Spice kicked off what some called the biggest short term social media success to date. The Old Spice ‘Your Man’ campaign, created by Wieden + Kennedy, included 183 videos featuring Isaiah Mustafa personally replying to consumers on YouTube.

The campaign yielded astonishing results:

• 130 million YouTube views
• +118% Facebook fans
• +227% YouTube subscribers
• +2800% Twitter followers

The campaign was groundbreaking in many ways. Wieden’s global interactive creative director Iain Tait told Fast Company they had a team of editors and creatives creating the ads in real time. And the tactic clearly established a strong community footprint for Proctor & Gamble’s Old Spice brand.

Overall conversation sentiment was 86% positive.

But interestingly, Isaiah Mustafa was the most mentioned related to the topic. No words directly related to Old Spice’s products even appear in the topic cloud.

How did the online buzz translate to sales? An Ad Age article reported: for the four weeks ending June 13, Old Spice’s sales were up 106% from the prior-year period. But, sales of Gillette body wash, backed by buy-one-get-one-free coupons and by their own TV ads were up a lot more, 277% (though it’s by far a smaller brand in the category).

And while Old Spice enjoyed a noticeable spike in the Body Wash conversation over Nivea, Gillette, Dove and Axe during the weeks surrounding the campaign, overall online chatter has leveled off among all competitors in the category.

Can Old Spice keep the conversation going? And what will Old Spice do with the online community footprint it has built to convert the fans and followers into loyal customers?

In addition, what’s a Facebook fan really worth? With answers ranging from $136.38 to $3.60, Forrester research says: zero, unless and until the brand does something to create value with Facebook fans.

How can other brands learn from this campaign to create other successful real-time marketing campaigns?

The May 2009 Social Radar Top 50 measures the brands with the most active Web presence based on overall online conversation volume. To create the Top 50 list, we used Social Radar to analyze millions of blog posts, news feeds, forums, social networks and Twitter posts to aggregate a list of the words and brands mentioned most frequently on the Web during May 2009. The list measures the number of unique individuals or sources that posted content about each brand during May 2009 rather than the overall number of mentions, which would be more heavily influenced by big fans who post frequently about a specific brand.

The top six brands held their positions in this month’s list. Twitter, Google, Obama, iPhone, Facebook and YouTube remain strong with increased buzz across all online mediums. Windows jumped past Mac this month thanks to buzz on Windows 7. Linux moved up two spots, while the NBA jumped six spots thanks to an exciting month of Playoff games. The NBA’s active Twitter account has nearly 700,000 followers, and several players are also tweeting. Notably, @dwighthoward, who gave a shout out to his Twitter followers in a post-game interview, has quickly amassed nearly 200,000 followers and has been called the next big ad man by Ad Age.

Dell jumped 22 spots thanks in part to a new Studio line of laptops, as well as the continued growth of @delloutlet, which has nearly 600,000 followers on Twitter. BlackBerry jumped five spots, corresponding with their strong sales — BlackBerry Curve is outselling iPhone so far in 2009. Nintendo dropped 8 spots as some of the video game chatter shifted to Microsoft’s Project Natal and Sony’s Motion Controller.

View the full list below, or download the PDF. For additional information about how you can analyze chatter sentiment to gauge positivity/negativity, view key words mentioned about your brand and identify key influencers, visit www.infegy.com/socialradar.

Questions or comments? Twitter me @adamcoomes.

It seems that Twitter is changing the world 140 characters at a time. We reported last week that Twitter was the most social brand in the month of March. Twitter experienced 76.8% growth during March as everybody from Snoop Dogg to Fortune 500 companies to local churches to President Obama is tweeting on a regular basis. Here are just a few headlines this week:

Twitter Passes New York Times
Is Twitter Killing RSS?
AT&T uses Twitter during service outage
New York church brings Good Friday to Twitter

Think about that for a minute. Twitter is surpassing one of the most established publications in the world, eliminating the need for feed readers, providing reliable communication during an outage for one of the biggest cellular service providers, and even spreading the gospel.

Rainn Wilson says he has more twitter followers than the population of Tulsa after just a few months on Twitter.

John Mayer says he was lamenting the loss of fan mail in the tech age until he realized Twitter is the next best thing.

Golfweek says Twitter is the biggest trend to hit the Masters since the green jacket.

Ad Age says that advertising agencies need to think more Twitter and less TV.

How has this micro-blogging company with only 30 employees surpassed behemoth Google in buzz within the last few months? Check out the chart below to see how Twitter has surged past big names like iPhone, Facebook and even Google in web chatter.

Nearly 1 out of every 100 online conversations mentions Twitter. And only a fraction of the population has actually realized the power of Twitter. Where is its ceiling?