The Secret Strategies Behind Many Viral Videos. Update Dan has a follow up to this post, here. This guest post was written by Dan Ackerman Greenberg, co founder of viral video marketing company The Comotion Group and lead TA for the Stanford Facebook Class. Dan will graduate from the Stanford Management Science Engineering Masters program in June. Have you ever watched a video with 1. You. Tube and thought to yourself How the hell did that video get so many views Chances are pretty good that this didnt happen naturally, but rather that some company worked hard to make it happen some company like mine. When most people talk about viral videos, theyre usually referring to videos like Miss Teen South Carolina, Smirnoffs Tea Partay music video, the Sony Bravia ads, Soulja Boy videos that have traveled all around the internet and been posted on You. Watch Greenberg Online' title='Watch Greenberg Online' />Tube, My. Space, Google Video, Facebook, Digg, blogs, etc. Over the past year, I have run clandestine marketing campaigns meant to ensure that promotional videos become truly viral, as these examples have become in the extreme. In this post, I will share some of the techniques I use to do my job to get at least 1. Secret 1 Not all viral videos are what they seem. There are tens of thousands of videos uploaded to You. Hearst Agrees to Buy Rodale, Publisher of Mens Health By SYDNEY EMBER The deal is expected to close next year and is another sign of consolidation in a magazine. Tube each day Ive heard estimates between 1. I dont care how viral you think your video is no one is going to find it and no one is going to watch it. The members of my startup are hired guns our clients give us videos and we make them go viral. Our rule of thumb is that if we dont get a video 1. So far, weve worked on 8. In the past 3 months, weve achieved over 2. In other words, not all videos go viral organically there is a method to the madness. I cant reveal our clients names and I cant link to the videos weve worked on, because You. Tube surely doesnt like what were doing and our clients hate to admit that they need professional help with their viral videos. But I can give you a general idea of who weve worked with two top Hollywood movie studios, a major record label, a variety of very well known consumer brands, and a number of different startups, both domestic and international. This summer, we were approached by a Hollywood movie studio and asked to help market a series of viral clips they had created in advance of a blockbuster. The videos were 1. CGI. Needless to say, the studio had invested a significant amount of money in creating the videos but every time they put them online, they couldnt get more than a few thousand views. We took six videos and achieved 6 million views on You. Tube3. 0,0. 00 ratings1. All six videos made it into the top 5 Most Viewed of the Day, and the two that went truly viral 1. Most Viewed of the Week. The following principles were the secrets to our success. Update Dan has a follow up to this post, here. This guest post was written by Dan Ackerman Greenberg, cofounder of viral video marketing company The. Watch movies online free stream Soylent Green 1973 With the world ravaged by the greenhouse effect and overpopulation, an NYPD detective investigates the. Court Denies Shareholder Claim Against AIG Bailout Case Led by Starrs Greenberg. Content is NOT King. If you want a truly viral video that will get millions of people to watch and share it, then yes, content is key. But good content is not necessary to get 1. Dont get me wrong the content is what will drive visitors back to a site. So a video must have a decent concept, but one shouldnt agonize over determining the best viral video possible. Generally, a concept should not be forced because it fits a brand. Rather, a brand should be fit into a great concept. Here are some guidelines we follow Make it short 1. Design for remixing create a video that is simple enough to be remixed over and over again by others. Ex Dramatic HamsterDont make an outright ad if a video feels like an ad, viewers wont share it unless its really amazing. Ex Sony Bravia. Make it shocking give a viewer no choice but to investigate further. Ex UFO HaitiUse fake headlines make the viewer say, Holy shit, did that actually happen Ex Stolen NascarAppeal to sex if all else fails, hire the most attractive women available to be in the video. Ex Yoga 4 DudesThese recent videos would have been perfect had they been viral ads pointing people back to websites 3. Core Strategy Getting onto the Most Viewed page. Now that a video is ready to go, how the hell is it going to attract 1. The core concept of video marketing on You. Tube is to harness the power of the sites traffic. Heres the idea something like 8. You. Tube, and a significant number of those views come from people clicking the Videos tab at the top. The goal is to get a video on that Videos page, which lists the Daily Most Viewed videos. If we succeed, the video will no longer be a single needle in the haystack of 1. It will be one of the twenty videos on the Most Viewed page, which means that we can grab 12. And the higher up on the page our video is, the more views we are going to get. So how do we get the first 5. Most Viewed list Blogs We reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and actually pay them to post our embedded videos. Stream Frontline PBS episodes for free and find out when its on TV, via PBS New York station THIRTEEN. Channel 2 Arutz 2, Ch. Mate Yehuda, Israel. Watch live, find information here for this television station online. Philip Bloom is a filmmaker who shoots with hoppedup digital SLRs for a much more cinematic look than you get out of your typical smartphone or handcam. Sounds a little bit like cheatingPay. Per. Post, but its effective and its not against any rules. Forums We start new threads and embed our videos. Sometimes, this means kickstarting the conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different users. Yes, its tedious and time consuming, but if we get enough people working on it, it can have a tremendous effect. My. Space Plenty of users allow you to embed You. Tube videos right in the comments section of their My. Space pages. We take advantage of this. Watch Greenberg Online Free' title='Watch Greenberg Online Free' />Facebook Share, share, share. Weve taken Dave Mc. Clures advice and built a sizeable presence on Facebook, so sharing a video with our entire friends list can have a real impact. Other ideas include creating an event that announces the video launch and inviting friends, writing a note and tagging friends, or posting the video on Facebook Video with a link back to the original You. Tube video. Email lists Send the video to an email list. Depending on the size of the list and the recipients willingness to receive links to You. Tube videos, this can be a very effective strategy. Friends Make sure everyone we know watches the video and try to get them to email it out to their friends, or at least share it on Facebook. Each video has a shelf life of 4. Daily Most Viewed list to the Weekly Most Viewed list, so its important that this happens quickly. As I mentioned before, when done right, this is a tremendously successful strategy. Title Optimization. Once a video is on the Most Viewed page, what can be done to maximize viewsIt seems obvious, but people see hundreds of videos on You. Tube, and the title and thumbnail are an easy way for video publishers to actively persuade someone to click on a video. Watch D Frag Episode 1 English Sub. Titles can be changed a limitless number of times, so we sometimes have a catchy and somewhat misleading title for the first few days, then later switch to something more relevant to the brand. Recently, Ive noticed a trend towards titling videos with the phrases exclusive, behind the scenes, and leaked video. Thumbnail Optimization. If a video is sitting on the Most Viewed page with nineteen other videos, a compelling video thumbnail is the single best strategy to maximize the number of clicks the video gets. You. Tube provides three choices for a videos thumbnail, one of which is grabbed from the exact middle of the video. As we edit our videos, we make sure that the frame at the very middle is interesting. Its no surprise that videos with thumbnails of half naked women get hundreds of thousands of views. Greenberg, Grant Richards is an accredited international commercial collection agency. We specialize in fast and efficient B2B debt recovery. Nearly two years after its initial public offering, Atlassian Inc.