Publishing Viral Video & Youtube

This post is in response to the assignment that the class had to read that focused on viral video and Youtube. We have been working on a video in class for the past week and a half now. When starting this project I simply thought that it was just going to be for extra credit, but after seeing my groups completed project I thought that it was really fun. It was amazing to see that so many different things (pictures, clips, etc.) could be combined to make an interesting video, and something that people have never seen before.

The article talked about how there are a lot of different videos that can go viral. These videos can be made by someone like me and you or a company itself. We have looked at a lot of different videos that have gone viral in this class. Some of the videos have even been popular enough to be turned into commercials. The two that come to mind are the Mcdonald's commercial and the Apple Itouch commercial. Both of these were made by regular people and after being posted to Youtube, they were recognized. With so many people using the web, Youtube has been a great way for people to get something out there.

Look at the video's that we made in class. We had an array of topics that dealt with certain issues. Even if our videos may not go viral they are going to get viewed by some people. This is one of the reasons why the web is so great. Youtube can also be great for pr. Not only is it a way to do cheap and easy promotion, a lot of companies are going to be in need of some good pr and crisis management after some videos are posted. Take the Comcast viral video for example. The worker slept for over an hour. After people saw this they were probably outraged. I am sure that Comcast hired some good publicist to right there wrong. I really liked this article and in case some of you did not read it I put the six ways that the article mentioned about how to maximize viral videos potential.

1. Keep your video clips short, preferable under 5 minutes. Most people browse through a number of videos when visiting sites like YouTube and Google Video, and may be unwilling to give any one video too much of their time.

2. Ensure that your video has interesting, entertaining or provocative content. If it doesn't "wow" people, they will have little incentive to share it with other people they know, or across their social networks.

3. Be cautious about including commercial or promotional content. The most powerful short videos are those which are purely entertaining. It's when people click through to your site that the time is right to add your sales message.

4. Don't plan on creating just one video. It is hard, if not impossible, to accurately predict which videos will enjoy wide, viral distribution. Our own testing demonstrated that some videos were shared more than ten times as much as others. So plan on creating a series of clips, and learn from the one which performs the best.

5. Optimize your video clips to maximize distribution across social network sites, use tags and bookmarking links to help people find, save and share your videos.

6. Create videos that multiple people (possibly some of your customers) appear in. The best team of viral marketers you can hire are people who appear in your video and pass the video to their friends and family.