HOW TO: Get the Most Out of Twitter #Hashtags

Thanks Mashable for this useful stuff on #

One of the most complex features of Twitter for new users to understand is the hashtag, a topic with a hash symbol (”#”) at the start to identify it. Twitter hashtags like #followfriday help spread information on Twitter while also helping to organize it.

The hashtag is a favorite tool of conferences and event organizers, but it’s also a way for Twitter users to organize themselves: if everyone agrees to append a certain hashtag to tweets about a topic, it becomes easier to find that topic in search, and more likely the topic will appear in Twitter’s Trending Topics.

So how do you disseminate and make sense of all this hashtag madness? By going through the art of the hashtag step-by-step, of course. This short guide details how to identify, track, use, and organize hashtags in an efficient and useful way. Just be sure not to flaunt your new hashtag wisdom.

Have a tip to share on hashtags or a unique way you utilize them? Be sure to share with everyone in the comments.

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1. Identifying hashtags

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For new Twitter users, and even we veterans, figuring out what a specific hashtag is being used for can be a major chore. When a hashtag starts to trend, it gets even more difficult to parse the information stream.

So what’s the most efficient way to figure out those nasty hashtags? Luckily, there a few great tools that can assist in hashtag enlightenment:

What the Trend?: This useful little service makes it really easy to learn about trending hashtags. When something starts trending, What the Trend? will provide a quick blurb on what’s going on.

Twubs: Twubs, which we recently reviewed, uses a wiki system to help disseminate information on a hashtag. It aggregates tweets and imports pictures to help illuminate the topics being discussed.

Hashtags.org: While not the best at helping you understand the meaning behind a tag, Hashtags.org is good at showing you its use over time and recent tweets, which oftentimes is enough to figure out the meaning behind the tag.

Tagalus: Tagalus is a simple dictionary for hashtags. It’s very easy to find information on thousands of hashtags as defined by other users. You can also define a hashtag by tweeting tagalus.

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2. Tracking hashtags

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What’s buzzing on Twitter right now? If you’re a tech journalist, marketing professional, or just a person interested in trends, there are many useful tools and techniques to keep up with the Twitter conversation via hashtags.

If you’re trying to track tweets from a hashtag in real-time, Monitter and Twitterfall are good choices. Once again, Hashtags.org provides graphs and hour-by-hour information on top hashtags.

One last tip: if you need to track a less popular Twitter hashtag, try setting up a Twilert to get a daily email of the use of a specific hashtag.

For more, be sure to check out 15 Fascinating Ways to Track Twitter Trends.

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3. Using hashtags

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Although not terribly complicated, hashtags have some unwritten rules. The primarily one to remember: don’t overuse them. If every one of your tweets IS a hashtag, you dilute the usefulness of them by fragmenting the conversation. In addition, many people will shy away from you because it seems spammy.

Another simple tip: give your hashtag context. Most people won’t actually know what your hashtag means, so give a quick explanation in one of your tweets or, if you’re making a hashtag, make it very apparent what it’s talking about.

Finally, if you’re looking to create a hashtag, be sure that it adds value for yourself and your followers. The best way to utilize them is when you need to organize information. Conferences, major events, and even reminders (i.e. #todo) can help organize specific tweets and make life easier on you and your followers.

The Twitter Fan Wiki also has some interesting reading material on hashtags if you’re looking to further your hashtag education.

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4. Organizing hashtags

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When I speak of organizing hashtags, I’m talking about conferences and events, which rely on the hashtag system more than almost any other entity. It’s become standard to track the conversation regarding speakers and afterparties via a hashtag.

If you’re about to put on an event or are looking to take your event to a new level, here are some useful tips for hashtag organization:

- Choose a single hashtag early: This may seem simple, but it is vital to get right. Choose a simple hashtag that represents your event or brand. If your event is the Business of the Calling Ducks conference, don’t use #businessofthecallingducks as your tag. How about #bizducks instead?

- Remind attendees of the hashtag constantly: On your website, on your Twitter feed, at the opening remarks, and throughout the day, make a friendly reminder about your hashtag and that you can track the conversation through it.

- Provide a website widget: For anyone who isn’t using or knowledgeable with Twitter, provide an easy conversation tracker tool on your website. You can make one via Widgetbox or Tweetgrid.

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More Twitter resources from Mashable

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- HOW TO: Use Twitter for Customer Service
- 5 Terrific Twitter Research Tools
- HOW TO: Find a Job on Twitter
- 10 Most Extraordinary Twitter Updates
- 40 of the Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them

Cars, twitter and a new adserving model

Thansk Contagious and Adage for these posts on who some auto manufactueres are tapping into microblogging

First this overview from Contagious

Volvo's Multi-Purpose Banner Ad

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21/04/2009

Swedish Automaker Volvo, has taught the old banner ad a few new tricks thanks to a campaign masterminded by Euro RSCG Worldwide. The new multi-purpose ad not only measures a whopping 950 x 250 pixels but also contains photos, videos, an advergame and regular Twitter

www.thevolvotwitterad.com

The initiative is in promotion of the new automatic braking or 'city safety' feature on Volvo's latest XC60 sports utility vehicle - a system which is being debuted at the New York Auto Show, from which the brand is providing constant Twitter updates that get displayed in the banner.This Twitter feed has been enabled thanks to Google's DoubleClick technology, which relays the 'Tweets' via an RSS feed. The most recent update is displayed, although users can scroll down to catch up on previous news. The brand launched its Twitter profile 3 months ago and currently has over 1200 followers.

www.thecarthatstopsitself.com

As the very best 'must-see' viral adverts have shown (think Cadbury's Gorilla) when content is engaging enough, its consumption can become something of an event. By squeezing its campaign into one banner ad, Volvo has streamlined this process for the user. Furthermore, the inclusion of a Twitter feed not only keeps it up to date, but also gives the initiative a human voice that should set it apart from the more standard intrusive banner ad.

In other automotive Twitter news this week, Tata-owned brand Land Rover has also been documenting its presence at the New York Auto Show using a Twitter hashtag, #LRNY, which filters conversations, aggregating chat and information about the brand.

updates.

During the lead up to the auto show, these tags were seeded in trade press publications, through online media channels and outdoors on billboards, taxis etc. Also, the brand enlisted (via direct-marketing firm Wunderman) the help of Twittad - a US-based Twitter advertising specialist which payed a selection of 15 popular users (typically with an excess of 3000 followers each) to feature extensive branding on their profile pages. James Eliason, CEO of Twittad reported that in total the effort was Twittered to more than 300,000 followers.

www.twittad.com

Then, this more in-depth piece of the LandRover work from AdAge

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Land Rover Taps Twitter as Campaign Cornerstone

'Hashtags,' Fledgling Ad Network Help Get the Word out Across Microblogging Site

by Jeremy Mullman

Published: April 20, 2009

CHICAGO (AdAge.com) -- Land Rover last week became the first national brand to execute a national Twitter campaign in a bid to promote its newest models' debuts at the New York Auto Show.

While brands as diverse as Southwest Airlines and Smirnoff vodka have been tweeting and accumulating followers for months, Land Rover attempted to use the burgeoning social-media platform in a more ambitious way, seeding so-called hashtags (words used in tweets that make it easier to follow an ongoing conversation via online searches) on billboards, taxi TVs and other out-of-home venues; spreading word of the Twitter effort through auto-obsessed blogs and online publications eager for a peek at its latest bells and whistles; and paying a fledgling Twitter ad network to spread the word among its army of compensated, heavily followed Twitter users, all of whom wallpapered their Twitter profiles with Land Rover branding.

While it's too early to know what sort of return Land Rover will receive for its efforts, "it cost us virtually nothing," said Keith Rhodes, VP and account director at WPP-owned direct-marketing firm Wunderman, which orchestrated the effort.

Mr. Rhodes said he was particularly encouraged by the Twitter-fueled traffic to a blog post he wrote about Land Rover's initiative. Posts on his site typically draw about 30 views; this one grabbed more than 200,000 views.

Land Rover is not likely to remain the only national marketer doing this for long, said James Eliason, CEO of Twittad, the Des Moines-based "social-media affinity network" Wunderman tapped to boost Land Rover's launch.

Mr. Eliason said the next national effort using Twittad's roster of 4,500 Tweeters, whom it pays to post on topics and brand their profile pages, with nearly 5 million followers, will be for Elations, a glucosamine-enhanced beverage from the makers of Sunny Delight targeted at women over 40.

Twitter machine
All told, the Land Rover effort was Twittered to more than 300,000 followers, Mr. Eliason said. Twittad used 15 different Tweeters with at least 5,000 followers, although the majority had between 2,000 and 4,000 followers.

Most won't get rich doing this anytime soon. One paid Tweeter, willconley777, wrote on his blog that he was paid $2.50 for letting Land Rover sponsor his profile page for seven days. Mr. Conley has 1,160 followers. Still, for those few Twitter users with huge reach, real money might one day be possible. The most-followed Land Rover campaign participant, queenoftheclick, boasts nearly 25,000 followers and was paid an amount "in the hundreds" for her participation, Mr. Eliason said.

Other larger-scale marketers are also eyeing Twittad, which is in talks with Sears.

The appeal to marketers is obvious: It's a cheap way to reach people through their trusted contacts. And Twittad's technology is able to sort its users by geography, demographics and interests, which can both lead to more targeted appeals and, perhaps, prevent Twitter users from feeling under siege by advertisers, a major concern.

"We were worried it would be considered spam, but we didn't get a single complaint [about Land Rover]," Mr. Eliason said. "What that tells me is that our connectors have influence."

Less clear is whether the model is sustainable. Mr. Eliason, who launched Twittad eight months ago, said he expects it to break even by the end of its first year. He said he has contacted Twitter about a revenue-sharing agreement but has yet to hear back.

Viral - some interesting observations

This is taken straight from Go Viral's newsletter - so big up to them!

Newsletter from GoViral
Cannes Lions 2008 and Females in viral campaigns

Dear Reader,
Welcome to our July newsletter. In this edition, we take a closer look at Cannes Lions 2008 winners Microsoft's "Halo 3" and Burger King's "The Whopper Freakout". This monthly insight tunes in on the lack of viral campaigns targeted against women.
In the last newsletter we introduced you to our new book "The Social Metropolis" – it is now available for free download here . You can also enjoy our seminar in Cannes here .
Enjoy!


Cannes Lions 2008 – Microsoft's Halo 3 and Burger King's "The Whopper Freakout"
We have again reached that time of the year, where advertisers from all over the world gather and celebrate the passing year and select their favorite commercials. This year's viral contestants included Burger King's "Whopper Freak out" and four spots from Halo 3.

Microsoft's Halo 3
T.A.G. and McCann made a homerun and won the Grand Prix prize in the Film category for the Halo 3 Believe campaign, which included 'Gravesite,' 'Enemy Weapon', 'John 117/monument' and 'Combat' for Microsoft's Xbox 360. The four spots are part of larger campaign, which initiated at the end of 2006. The campaign consisted of five major phases (that you can read about in our new book ) until its release on September 25th 2007. The overall theme of the campaign is rather untraditional for a computer game. Users are guided around in the remnants of a post-world war, taking place after the two first games. Real actors play the roles of surviving veterans guiding the users through a memorial walk of the wars. The four spots were a part of phase 5 and apart from them, it consisted of a Halo 3 website, serving as a virtual museum, providing an interactive fly through of the entire John 117 monument – allowing visitors to peek right into the fight. They could also learn more about our enemies and hear first hand stories from the men, who were there. The four spots consist of interviews with surviving veterans of the battle who served with Master Chief. They talk about their experiences and speak with reverence and awe about what it was like to serve with mankind's greatest hero.
Watch Enemy Weapon
Watch John 117/Monument
Watch Combat
Watch Gravesite

Burger King's "The Whopper Freakout"
This year, "Whopper Freakout" – created by Crispin Porter & Bogusky, Miami – stood out and won gold in the cyber category. Depriving Whopper fans of their favorite burger turns out to be a surefire way to get them to buy more. To coincide with the 50th Anniversary of the Whopper, Burger King conducted a social experiment removing the Whopper from the menu. On December 2007, a variety of television, interactive, radio and print executions rolled out and whopperfreakout.com was introduced. Hidden cameras show what happens at two Burger King outlets, when a actual Burger King customer is being told that the chain no longer serves Whoppers. The campaign explores the emotional attachment that people hold towards products and in this case – the Whopper. The clips document the reactions from upset customers. One reaction was: "What are you going to put on the logo now -- home of the 'Whatever we got'?". The message was clear – people didn't like it. The campaign was a huge success and drove sales of the Whopper up by 29%. The website created for this campaign received 4 million views by mid-March, and had 250,000 unique visitors in the month of December alone. Spoofs of the TV ads were created and posted on the internet. Not only did the campaign help strengthen the sales at Burger Kings restaurants nation wide, but also, competitors showed signs of slower traffic.
Watch The Whopper Freakout here

Insight of the month: Lacking focus on females in viral marketing.
One of the seminars at Cannes Lions 2008 was held by Cheil Worldwide: A Day In The Life Of A Mobile Phone In Seoul. The seminar positioned delegates in the minds of YMCs (Young-Minded Consumer) living in the modern digital metropolis of Seoul. And through that experience, delegates saw how today's youth consumer is making the mobile device an extension of his/her existence. As Pernille Fruensgaard write on her blog , one of the interesting parts of the seminar was, that the mobile services discussed by Cheil were primarily targeted young females, and that these served as drivers of the services making them a natural part of their daily lives and social connections.
Right now, the nature of viral campaigns in Europe seems to be driven by and to masculine humor and the nature of females, linked up to networking and sharing of information/stories/gossip, is not addressed in viral campaigns. Interestingly, their nature would be a perfect catalyst for spreading a message, if it is possible to use in their social activities.
A study from Lucid Marketing concludes that women uses word of mouth more than men. Women are more likely than men to share a positive experience with a business (91% versus 83%), or a product (95% versus 89%). The same conclusion is found at Jackie Huba's blog , where she ask Michele Miller, co-author of the new book "The Soccer Mom Myth: Today's Female Consumer: How She Really Is, Why She Really Buys", to share five tips for understanding word of mouth and women. "Ask any woman how she found her hairdresser, doctor, or favorite wine, and she is likely to tell you that it was from a friend. Women are natural word of mouth spreaders. They are wired that way – with four times as many connections between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, women tap deeply into that area that is responsible for bonding and connecting with others".
So, brands for female segments should definitely not disregard word of mouth marketing, when planning future campaigns. In fact, it could prove a very profitable decision.

Subscribe to Go Viral's newsletter

Social Media's Role in a Media Plan

Thanks to Joe Marchese from OnlineSpin for these thoughts:

What role should social media play in a marketer's media plan? It's funny that something with the word "media" in its name isn't a shoe-in as a line item on most media plans. But the truth is that social media pulls more commonly from the "experimental" budgets (re: leftover or test) rather than the main "planned" media budget.

The even funnier thing is that this is both shocking and not surprising. It's shocking, given the reach and depth of connection social media offers, yet not surprising because no one has unlocked social media in a way that demonstrates return on marketing objectives, such as reasonable expected range of outcome at for set amount of resource allocation. If you are a brand or an agency, there is not much more you can do but test various methods and watch longingly as your potential brand advocates and customers participate in a media category without you. But it's not the end of the world, as long as your competitors don't figure out how to benefit from social media in a scalable manner before you.

Balancing the attractiveness of the social media opportunity and the cost-benefit analysis of current social media advertising methods leaves us back at the start. What role should social media play in your media plan? I will be moderating this topic at OMMA Social next week. And I can't believe my luck, as I am looking forward to finding at least a couple of answers, given the amazing panel I will be leading. The panel is titled "Media Plans: Additive or Core Ingredient? Putting Social Media in the Mix" (http://www.mediapost.com/ommasocial/index.cfm?ip=Agenda) consists of: Joe Marchese, president, SocialVibe.com (who I hear is very funny and good-looking) Augustine Fou, SVP, digital strategist, MRM Worldwide Greg Verdino, Chief Strategy Officer, Crayon David Berkowitz, director of emerging media and client s trategy, 360i Rich Gagnon, Chief Media Officer, Draft FCB Adam J. Broitman, director of emerging and creative strategy, Morpheus Media.

Since I will be moderating, I thought I would get a couple of my thoughts out now. No surprise, I think social media should be a core component of your marketing mix. But test first. Social media marketing should have to pass the same test any other business relationship would. Allocate a reasonable budget to various social media marketing initiatives and analyze the results.

Once you find results that are favorable, or even comparable to your other online or offline marketing activities, look to scale those efforts, and continue to monitor return. The cost of monitoring your return this closely might throw off your ROI in the short run, but as you scale your efforts, testing results will become a smaller component of cost.

A lot of marketers would claim to be doing this, but they are not. What is more common is allocating far less budget to social media and looking at it more like buying a lottery ticket. Meaning: they're pinning their hopes on something going viral (aka winning the lottery) and if it doesn't, at least the expense wasn't too high.

Every marketer looks at social media and wants "The Blair Witch Project" (low budget, cultural phenomenon). Instead, they end up with a string of social media tests that seem to suggest they can't drive ROI from social media marketing. Let me be clear: There is no such thing as "free media," free media is just media you achieve by spending your time and money on developing assets that reduce the amount of money you had to spend to "buy media."

Throwing money at social media doesn't work, either. Achieving success in social media requires commitments longer than many campaigns are scheduled to run. So don't spread your social media budget over some artificial timeline created by your media plan, but regard it as an "always on" component. You can always scale up and down at appropriate times, given business cycles or product releases. But keeping a consistent presence can allow you to reap the full benefits of social media.

The frustrations of Search when it comes to clients

This post is with thanks to MediaPost's - Search Insider

The Common Thread of Consumer Content

Posted May 16th, 2008 by Chris Copeland

“No man is an island, entire of itself”
-John Donne

Search marketers have spent more time on the proverbial island than the cast of “Lost.” All of the adages about “playing at the kids’ table” to “functioning in a silo” have been appropriate at various times over the past decade. This practice of “siloed” work has been perpetuated by marketing departments that have seen search as an IT function or a “Web” thing. Marketing agencies have seen it as a boutique offering that can be acquired or developed using a handful of people with varying talents, and surprisingly, it has been perpetuated by the search engines themselves.

A few months back, I was sitting with a high-profile client at an all-day event with one of the major engines. The event was designed to allow the client’s CMO an opportunity to visit the campus, experience the search engine’s way of life/thinking and dive into a variety of areas that held interest for this advertiser. We do a fair amount of meetings like these, and they frequently involve the following cast of characters: The Mobile guy, The Social expert, The Analytics guru, The Emerging Media specialist and the standard Paid Search/Display advertising team. In some cases, the net gets a bit bigger and TV, radio and print get thrown into the discussion.

Yet, for all the brain wattage and opportunity that exists, these meetings usually lack one simple thing: a thread. Advertisers have watched the marketplace become more and more fragmented and their audiences become more and more empowered to make their own decisions with little to no regard for the advertisers or its products. As this happens, one of the challenges becomes, how do we create touch points for our brand with consumers? As we like to put it, how do we connect advertiser content and consumer intent? This becomes even trickier when you start looking across platforms.

Let’s take the cast of characters in the room as I described above. In a normal situation, the individuals are allotted 30 minutes to discuss what’s now and what’s coming tomorrow in their space and inside their organization. They will cover it as it pertains to the advertiser and how consumers are consuming. They’ll then thank everyone and have a seat while the next cast member rises to give his audition for what the vendor hopes is a successful casting of all parts with one read-through. And while these discussions and pitches are often enlightening about the vendor’s point of view and differentiation in the marketplace, they lack a cohesion with each other.

One of the knocks over the years at varying times for several of the major search engines has been that they seem to be throwing things against the wall. If you put a product a day into Beta, surely something will come out a hit, right?

But what we are finding more and more is the ability to connect at different stages, with varying messages that all lead down the purchase/decision funnel. We’ve done research that shows the ability through search marketing to push consumers down the funnel. For search marketer and advertisers, this means the ability to take consideration seekers (as defined by their keywords) and turn them into purchasers. However, the funnel is not a channel-exclusive vehicle.

Search is an action, not a destination. No one searches because they just want to; they search because they need to in some way. So the purpose of search is a piece of the greater funnel that exists. Searching may be the pay off created by television, or it may be the start of the research phase that will ultimately lead to a conversion in-store or via a phone call. Yet without the thread between vehicles, digital or otherwise, there’s little chance to pay this off properly.

But, let’s be clear on one point: The thread is not about creative. It’s not as simple as saying that we use this phrasing in our television advertising so we should do the same in our rich-media units and search creative. The thread is about themes and connectivity to the consumer on his or her journey.

In my next column, we’ll explore what happens when the thread runs into the persona problem, and how marketers and their agency partners can begin to formulate thread-worthy approaches to consumer intent.


This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 8:30 am and is filed under Chris Copeland, Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
4 Responses to “The Common Thread Of Consumer Intent”
Paula Lynn from Who Else Unlimited; hollywood5459@verizon.net says:
May 16th, 2008 at 9:58 am
Impressed. “for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” Most people do not know it is a John Donne quote. Which opens a discussion - the influencing factors that create the need for the original search. Where does that bathrobe need come from? Or advise. Or…

Jeff Martin from Sales Driven Marketing LLC says:
May 16th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Great article, and I think it helps suggest there’s still a need for good marketing plans. New media, including search, is great at tracking, but at the end of the day, new media and search is only one piece of a well organized, well executed, comprehensive marketing plan.

Jeff
www.SalesDrivenMarketing.com

Leslie McKerns from McKerns Development says:
May 16th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
You are right, Chris - No one searches because they just want to; they search because they need to in some way. And there’s the problem. The company never thinks from the point of view of the searcher. It is so frustrating trying to find something on the web - it’s like going to TJ Maxx with a shopping list, you won’t find those things but you may stumble upon other things.

Themes and connectivity have to do with analyzing backwards - we have this thing, now how would people go about looking for it? And as far as touch points, analyze why they are searching (need) and what about this product would have particular appeal (relevance).
http://www.mckernsdevelopment.com

Meredith Speier from RMG Connect says:
May 20th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Great post Chris. As a planner, I often struggle with getting this message across to clients (and sometimes even internal team members). I would take your thought even one step further…while the thread is that single element that ties the entire consumer-brand communication together, it is the intent part of the equation that we as marketers need to nail. Knowing what makes a customer tick, which part of the purchase cycle they’re in, and what has driven them to the point they are are critical in pushing the right message to connect content to intent.

http://blogs.mediapost.com/search_insider/?p=789#comments

Earn mobile credit by getting your friends to watch ads!

Thanks Contagious

To anyone who’s on Virgin Mobile US and has befriended every man and his dog on Facebook, the ‘fund my phone’ application is a dream come true.

On adding the app to their profile, Facebook aficionados can invite their friends to watch ads by entering a phone number or email address in the ‘to’ box. They then receive an extra minute of free airtime for every four friends who give a minute of their time.

For Virgin Mobile, which has already experimented in the ad-funded calls area, ‘fund my phone’ marks a positive entry into the social networking space: not only do customers benefit directly, but non-Virgin Mobile users will be exposed to the brand and will see friends acquiring free minutes for themselves rather than relying on word of mouth.

‘Fund my phone’ extends Virgin Mobile’s SugarMama programme which offers customers up to 75 minutes of free airtime a month in return for watching ads (although no timewasters, please - participants have to answers questions to prove they were paying attention). Since it was first introduced in 2006, SugarMama has served up over 20m free minutes.

‘Fund my phone’ has already attracted 327 fans and five-star reviews from Facebook friends who, in the true spirit of social networking, are suggesting a ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ arrangement. It’s certainly refreshing to see an application that gives something meaningful back to users rather than the more run-of-the-mill vampire-bites or custard-pies.

Blyk, a similar service which has launched in the UK and is about to embark on a pan-European roll-out - has already sussed that the way to conquer the hearts and minds of mobile-obsessed 16-24 year olds is to give them free texts and free minutes in return for receiving between four and six ad messages a day. Blyk attracted 100,000 users in the UK six months ahead of its target and claims that response rates to its advertising messages from the likes of Xbox and adidas are averaging 29%.

If an ad does touch you in some way, the temptation to forward it to Facebook friends and earn free airtime will be hard to resist. Everyone’s a winner. But only if the ads are any good to start with…
www.virginmobileusa.com/stuff/sugarmama.do

How to do VIRAL

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 100,000 views on YouTube and thought to yourself: “How the hell did that video get so many views?” Chances are pretty good that this didn’t happen naturally, but rather that some company worked hard to make it happen – some company like mine.

When most people talk about “viral videos,” they’re usually referring to videos like Miss Teen South Carolina, Smirnoff’s Tea Partay music video, the Sony Bravia ads, Soulja Boy - videos that have traveled all around the internet and been posted on YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Facebook, Digg, blogs, etc. - videos with millions and millions of views.

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 100,000 people to watch my clients’ “viral” videos.

Secret #1: Not all viral videos are what they seem

There are tens of thousands of videos uploaded to YouTube each day (I’ve heard estimates between 10-65,000 videos per day). I don’t 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 don’t get a video 100,000 views, we don’t charge.

So far, we’ve worked on 80-90 videos and we’ve seen overwhelming success. In the past 3 months, we’ve achieved over 20 million views for our clients, with videos ranging from 100,000 views to upwards of 1.5 million views each. In other words, not all videos go viral organically – there is a method to the madness.

I can’t reveal our clients’ names and I can’t link to the videos we’ve worked on, because YouTube surely doesn’t like what we’re 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 we’ve 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 10-20 seconds each, were shot from what appeared to be a camera phone, and captured a series of unexpected and shocking events that required professional post-production and 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 couldn’t get more than a few thousand views.

We took six videos and achieved:

• 6 million views on YouTube
• ~30,000 ratings
• ~10,000 favorites
• ~10,000 comments
• 200+ blog posts linking back to the videos
• All six videos made it into the top 5 Most Viewed of the Day, and the two that went truly viral (1.5 million views each) were #1 and #2 Most Viewed of the Week.

The following principles were the secrets to our success.

2. 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 100,000 views if you follow these strategies.

Don’t get me wrong: the content is what will drive visitors back to a site. So a video must have a decent concept, but one shouldn’t 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: 15-30 seconds is ideal; break down long stories into bite-sized clips
• Design for remixing: create a video that is simple enough to be remixed over and over again by others. Ex: “Dramatic Hamster”
• Don’t make an outright ad: if a video feels like an ad, viewers won’t share it unless it’s really amazing. Ex: Sony Bravia
• Make it shocking: give a viewer no choice but to investigate further. Ex: “UFO Haiti”
• Use fake headlines: make the viewer say, “Holy shit, did that actually happen?!” Ex: “Stolen Nascar”
• Appeal to sex: if all else fails, hire the most attractive women available to be in the video. Ex: “Yoga 4 Dudes”

These recent videos would have been perfect had they been viral “ads” pointing people back to websites:

• Model Falls in Hole on Runway
• Cheerleader Gets Run Over By Football Team
• PacMan: The Chase
• Dude
• Dog Drives Car
• Snowball – Dancing Cockatoo

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 100,000 viewers?

The core concept of video marketing on YouTube is to harness the power of the site’s traffic. Here’s the idea: something like 80 million videos are watched each day on YouTube, 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 10,000 new videos per day. It will be one of the twenty videos on the Most Viewed page, which means that we can grab 1/20th of the clicks on that page! 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 50,000 views we need to get our videos onto the Most Viewed list?

• Blogs: We reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and actually pay them to post our embedded videos. Sounds a little bit like cheating/PayPerPost, but it’s effective and it’s 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, it’s tedious and time-consuming, but if we get enough people working on it, it can have a tremendous effect.
• MySpace: Plenty of users allow you to embed YouTube videos right in the comments section of their MySpace pages. We take advantage of this.
• Facebook: Share, share, share. We’ve taken Dave McClure’s 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 YouTube 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 YouTube 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 48 hours before it’s moved from the Daily Most Viewed list to the Weekly Most Viewed list, so it’s important that this happens quickly. As I mentioned before, when done right, this is a tremendously successful strategy.

4. Title Optimization

Once a video is on the Most Viewed page, what can be done to maximize views?

It seems obvious, but people see hundreds of videos on YouTube, and the title and thumbnail are an easy way for video publishers to actively persuade someone to click on a video. 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, I’ve noticed a trend towards titling videos with the phrases “exclusive,” “behind the scenes,” and “leaked video.”

5. 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.

YouTube provides three choices for a video’s 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. It’s no surprise that videos with thumbnails of half naked women get hundreds of thousands of views. Not to say that this is the best strategy, but you get the idea. Two rules of thumb: the thumbnail should be clear (suggesting high video quality) and ideally it should have a face or at least a person in it.

Also, when we feel particularly creative, we optimize all three thumbnails then change the thumbnail every few hours. This is definitely an underused strategy, but it’s an interesting way to keep a video fresh once it’s on the Most Viewed list.

See the highlighted videos in the screenshot below for a good example of how a compelling title and screenshot can make all the difference once the video is on the Most Viewed page.

6. Commenting: Having a conversation with yourself

Every power user on YouTube has a number of different accounts. So do we. A great way to maximize the number of people who watch our videos is to create some sort of controversy in the comments section below the video. We get a few people in our office to log in throughout the day and post heated comments back and forth (you can definitely have a lot of fun with this). Everyone loves a good, heated discussion in the comments section - especially if the comments are related to a brand/startup.

Also, we aren’t afraid to delete comments – if someone is saying our video (or your startup) sucks, we just delete their comment. We can’t let one user’s negativity taint everyone else’s opinions.

We usually get one comment for every thousand views, since most people watching YouTube videos aren’t logged in. But a heated comment thread (done well) will engage viewers and will drive traffic back to our sites.

7. Releasing all videos simultaneously

Once people are watching a video, how do we keep them engaged and bring them back to a website?

A lot of the time our clients say: “We’ve got 5 videos and we’re going to release one every few days so that viewers look forward to each video.”

This is the wrong way to think about YouTube marketing. If we have multiple videos, we post all of them at once. If someone sees our first video and is so intrigued that they want to watch more, why would we make them wait until we post the next one? We give them everything up front. If a user wants to watch all five of our videos right now, there’s a much better chance that we’ll be able to persuade them to click through to our website. We don’t make them wait after seeing the first video, because they’re never going to see the next four.

Once our first video is done, we delete our second video then re-upload it. Now we have another 48-hour window to push it to the Most Viewed page. Rinse and repeat. Using this strategy, we give our most interested viewers the chance to fully engage with a campaign without compromising the opportunity to individually release and market each consecutive video.

8. Strategic Tagging: Leading viewers down the rabbit hole

This is one of my favorite strategies and one that I think we invented. YouTube allows you to tag your videos with keywords that make your videos show up in relevant searches. For the first week that our video is online, we don’t use keyword tags to optimize the video for searches on YouTube. Instead, we’ve discovered that you can use tags to control the videos that show up in the Related Videos box.

I like to think about it as leading viewers down the rabbit hole. The idea here is to make it as easy as possible for viewers to engage with all your content, rather than jumping away to “related” content that actually has nothing to do with your brand/startup.

So how do we strategically tag? We choose three or four unique tags and use only these tags for all of the videos we post. I’m not talking about obscure tags; I’m talking about unique tags, tags that are not used by any other YouTube videos. Done correctly, this will allow us to have full control over the videos that show up as “Related Videos.”

When views start trailing off after a few days to a week, it’s time to add some more generic tags, tags that draw out the long tail of a video as it starts to appear in search results on YouTube and Google.

9. Metrics/Tracking: How we measure effectiveness

The following is how we measure the success of our viral videos.

For one, we tweak the links put up on YouTube (whether in a YouTube channel or in a video description) by adding “?video=1” to the end of each URL. This makes it much easier to track inbound links using Google Analytics or another metrics tool.

TubeMogul and VidMetrix also track views/comments/ratings on each individual video and draw out nice graphs that can be shared with the team. Additionally, these tools follow the viral spread of a video outside of YouTube and throughout other social media sites and blogs.

Conclusion

The Wild West days of Lonely Girl and Ask A Ninja are over. You simply can’t expect to post great videos on YouTube and have them go viral on their own, even if you think you have the best videos ever. These days, achieving true virality takes serious creativity, some luck, and a lot of hard work. So, my advice: fire your PR firm and do it yourself.