As NewTeeVee looks at TubeMogul and Vidmetrix in Emerging Company Category: Video Metrics, and offers Online Video Predictions for 2008, I'm still thinking about who and what are behind various viral videos, as discussed in previous posts Go Viral + a web video swarm and Idiocracy kool-aid -- red or blue?Stanford grad student Dan Ackerman Greenberg, connected with Stanford's Persuasive Technology Lab, posted techniques for promoting videos in his TechCrunch article The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos. Christopher Herot summarized the article with a handy list in How to Make Your Video Viral - or- The First Law of Holes:
The Obvious:
- Make it short.
- Design for remixing, e.g. Dramatic Hamster.
- Don't make it an outright ad unless it;s as clever as the one for Sony Bravia.
- Make it shocking.
- Use fake headlines.
- Appeal to sex.
- Share the video with your friends on Facebook.
- Set up a Facebook event to promote your video.
- Send the video to a mailing list.
- Tell all your friends and get them to email and share it on Facebook.
- Pick a catchy thumbnail, preferably with a human face in it.
The Clever:
- Make sure the frame in the exact middle of the video is eye-catching, since it will be one of the three grabbed by YouTube.
- Change the thumbnail every few hours.
- If you have more than one video, release all of them simultaneously instead of dribbling them out one at a time.
- Pick unique tags for al you videos so they will show up in each other's 'related' lists.
The Sleazy:
- Pay bloggers to post embedded videos.
- Have your own employees to set up multiple accounts on a forum and start fake conversations with each other.
- Delete negative comments that others make.
- Embed videos in the comments section of people's MySpace pages
- Use a misleading title, with terms such as 'exclusive,' 'behind the scenes,' and 'leaked video.'
- Use an image of a half-naked woman in the thumbnail.
- Once the 48 hour window for 'most viewed' expires, delete the video and reload it.
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