Posting the clever Axe rebuttal to Old Spice's "man your man could smell like" got me curious about the actual success of the original viral video. Ask a group of people which was the most successful viral video of 2010 an chances are most people will nominate Isaiah Mustafa's brilliant turn on a horse.

Turns out, they'd be wrong. Very wrong in fact. On a recent chart of the most viral videos of 2010, Old Spice would rank 5th in the most shared videos. And surely sharing is a more successful measure of engagement than simply watching - Or is it?

One of my favourite brand virals from 2010 has to be the Toyota "Swagger Wagon": A hysterical urban music video parody that features a mother and father extolling the virtues of their new people carrier. For those of you that have missed it, you need to get more friends, this has been shared an astonishing 421,306 times. Top of the pile is the amazing World Cup video from Nike, that was shared more than half a million times, and was viewed more than twice as many times as the Toyota ad. 

To see a more detailed ranking about this year's video sharing successes, have a look at Unruly Media's Viral Spiral. (What a brilliant name!).

One of the most interesting aspects of the Viral Spiral, is the table that compares the number of "shares" to the number of "views", and the there's no hard and fast relationship between the two.