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Andrew Warner recently commented on my article, 3 Tips For Viral Marketing Success. It turns out that Andrew recently interviewed viral marketing ‘guru’, Hiten Shah, partner at ACS SEO and a guy who has helped grow online traffic for major tech players such as TechCrunch, Guy Kawasaki, HP and Samsung.

During the interview, Shah revealed a number of powerful techniques he recommends for optimizing viral marketing campaigns. Here are six (6) such techniques - techniques you may wish to consider using in one or more of YOUR viral marketing initiatives:

1. Use a ‘beat me’ or competitive approach. Websites that allow users to challenge each other are inherently viral. For example, eduFire.com went viral by allowing its users to play language games and then challenge friends to score higher.
2. Require people to refer others to the viral application or content in order to benefit. Put it this way, no-one can use Skype… unless others also use Skype. And the same goes for numerous other applications and services, ranging from email to PayPal.
3. Let people show off - let people create or contribute content, and share what they’ve created. Doing so is a major reason behind the viral success of GE’s online whiteboard.
4. Encourage people to share - make it super-easy for users to share and embed your content. Who does this exceptionally well? YouTube!
5. Give people something to boast about - give people something to brag or boast about… and they will! For example, when Feedburner created a badge allowing bloggers to show how many readers they had, bloggers everywhere began displaying Feedburner badges – leading to Feedburner’s growth.
6. Measure your progress - measure your viral growth to see what is working… and what isn’t… and make changes accordingly.

To learn more powerful viral marketing techniques, click here to listen to the full interview between Andrew and Hiten Shah.

Source: Andrew Warner, “7 Essential Tools of Viral Marketing - The Hiten Shah Interview”, Mixergy.com, September 5, 2008

Most viral campaigns aren’t mainstream successes… even those that are “successful”. But guess what? They don’t have to be. The key to a successful viral marketing campaign is to have your viral content shared widely within your particular niche.

Therefore, for your viral initiative to be successful, you don’t necessarily need to worry about trying to achieve a huge number of views for your YouTube video, or have your content exchanged by millions of ‘friends’ on social networks. In fact, having your viral video, quiz, game or report, etc vaguely amuse the masses may do NOTHING for your business.

What really matters is generating the right response from your target market.

For that reason, achieving a meaningful viral effect is really a matter of “seeding” your viral content with the key influencers within your niche. To do that, Justilien Gaspard - a writer with Search Engine Watch - recommends focusing on three places where such influencers are likely to ‘hang out’:

1. Discussion forums
2. Blogs, and
3. Email discussion groups

If you have a significant Twitter following, and/or are a member of some RELEVANT interest groups on one or more social networks, you could probably add Twitter and such social network groups, respectively, to that list.

Source: Justilien Gaspard, “Viral Link Building: Size Doesn’t Always Matter”, Search Engine Watch, September 4, 2008

Christine Beardsell offers three (3) nifty tips for seeding your videos in order to help them go viral.

In short, she recommends you approach seeding in three main ways:

1. Organic seeding: target your key influencers appropriately, be creative, and be prepared for a bit of work to lay the foundations for your viral campaign. Organic seeding is relatively cheap… but time and resource intensive.
2. Paid seeding: if you have the budget consider paying to place your video in strategic places (on blogs, on small network sites, and so on) or paying a professional viral company to do all that seeding for you. Ms Beardsell reckons it’s pretty rare for a branded viral video to take off organically, and that you’ll probably have to take out your wallet to ensure it gains traction. This is consistent with the viral movie tips we discussed here.
3. Syndication: create a mini site with RSS buttons to enable the video to be easily shared, and maybe set aside some money to create, or integrate your video into, one of the emerging social network video widgets. These have been virtually built to facilitate widespread viewing and sharing.

Sources: Christine Beardsell, “Strategies for Making Video Ads Go Viral”, The ClickZ Network, Aug 12, 2008

I’m a big fan of viral marketing. Maybe because of the enormous challenge involved in creating something that takes off in a huge way. Despite what some may say, this is much, much harder than it sounds. All the “refer a friend” scripts in the world can’t make up for a poor idea that no-one wants to share with others.

And yet we still see funny - but hardly earth-shattering - YouTube movies achieve upwards of 100,000 views. What do they have that our videos don’t? Are the ideas behind such movies so much better than ours? Maybe they are… but maybe they aren’t. So why do they seem to achieve a truly viral effect while our movies get nary the attention of a few of our buddies?

Well, before you beat yourself up over how hopeless your videos are… perhaps you’d appreciate knowing that the “viral” movies achieving 100,000+ views aren’t entirely viral at all. Rather than exemplifying a truly viral effect - i.e. where a movie is so compelling that it just has to be sent to one or two people before it spreads like wildfire… the success of many (if not most) incredibly popular YouTube movies is, in fact, the product of big money and time investments in what could only be called mass media “seeding” efforts.

And mass seeding – where a movie is “planted” among thousands and thousands of people – is not that different from spending money to advertise to thousands and thousands of people. Sure the extent to which those thousands become hundreds of thousands is where the viral effect comes into play… IF that too relies on viral marketing rather than further media manipulation…

Don’t believe me? Well, maybe you’ll believe Dan Ackerman Greenberg. Writing in Tech Crunch last year, Dan Ackerman Greenberg - whose company, The Commotion Group, has developed and spread viral movies for large movie studios and corporates - revealed the secret strategies his company uses to achieve 100,000+ views for movies uploaded to YouTube.

Most of Dan’s tips are enlightening and you’d probably do well to follow them. Others are, frankly, dishonest, and NOT recommended. Not if you want to build a successful business in a moral, ethical and legal way…

1. Dan’s Video Creation Tips

Firstly, here are Dan’s main tips for creating a popular YouTube video:

• Keep it short, ideally 15-30 seconds. Break down longer movies into 15-30 second segments.
• Don’t make your advertising message obvious.
• Be shocking. Ideally, the video should leave viewers wanting to know more.
• Use fake or controversial headlines that draw people in.
• Use sex appeal. According to Dan, alluring women still work like crazy.

2. Dan’s Video Distribution Tips

When he works on a viral movie, Dan’s first main goal is to get the movie onto YouTube’s Most Viewed page, which requires the movie to have at least 50,000 views. Here’s how he recommends you do it:

• Pay bloggers to embed the video in their blogs. Not to falsely rave about them, but simply to embed them. This is pretty much the same as buying advertising on someone’s blog. I think it’s okay as long as people aren’t misled into believing that a given blogger is objectively endorsing the video.
• Create multiple accounts on discussion forums, start and participate in threads, embed your video in one or more posts, and encourage colleagues or friends to participate in such threads in order to attract attention. Now, while it’s okay to get a few of your friends or employees to legitimately participate in such threads… it’s NOT okay to create multiple fake accounts and pretend to be different people participating in a discussion. That’s DISHONEST and a MAJOR NO-NO in my opinion. And some forums will kick you out for good if they find out what you’re doing. And they CAN find out by looking at the IP address of all those accounts (which will be the same).
• Embed your movies in the comments sections of MySpace members’ profiles. Unless the MySpace members in question don’t mind, this could border on being MySpace spam.
• Share your movies with friends in Facebook. You can do this in a number of ways: create an event to launch the video and invite friends… write a note about the movie and tag friends… post the video on Facebook Video with a link back to the original YouTube video.
• Send the video to your email list. Just be sure your list is likely to welcome such an email.
• Tell everyone you know about the video and try to get them to email it to their friends, share it on Facebook, etc.

3. Other Tips

• Use a catchy title and change it as needed to continue to attract attention.
• Use a compelling video thumbnail to help your video stand out on the Most Viewed video page in order to maximize the number of clicks your video receives.
• Create multiple fake YouTube accounts in order to create a heated, fake comment thread about the video in order to attract traffic to your website. Nothing wrong with a heated comment thread… as long as each participant is a separate person. As indicated above, I’m DEAD AGAINST using fake accounts. It’s DISHONEST.
• Delete negative comments. Although some would object to this, I think this is just sensible. A YouTube account is not - and doesn’t have to be – a democracy.
• Release multiple videos simultaneously. Rather than drip-feed viewers your videos, release them all at once. Dan says this works much better for attracting people to your website.
• Strategically tag videos - choose 3-4 unique tags and use only these tags for all related videos. This gives you greater control over what videos show up on YouTube as “Related Videos”. When views start trailing off after 3-7 days, add more generic tags to enable the movie to feature in relevant search results on YouTube and Google.
• Track your videos by, for example, adding “?video=1″ (or similar) at the end of the links you place on YouTube. This will enable you to see how much website traffic comes from the video.

So there you have Dan Ackerman Greenberg’s tips for achieving 100,000+ views for your YouTube movie. Most are useful… some are dodgy and not recommended… and all indicate that “viral” success is not just a matter of loading your video onto YouTube and hoping it will go viral of its own accord. It’s about putting time, effort and some money into significant seeding…

Sources: Dan Ackerman Greenberg, “The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos”, Tech Crunch, November 22, 2007, Michael Arrington, “Follow Up To The Viral Video Post: Dan Wants Another Word”, Tech Crunch, November 24, 2008

eMarketer reports that online marketers will spend $40 million on developing, distributing and promoting widgets in 2008, a huge jump over the $15 million they invested last year. But unless they’ve done their math, they may actually be losing money on this form of marketing.

A widget is a small software application or “applet” that can be installed on and integrated with a social media site, a web browser or your desk top. As a marketing tool, a widget is generally intended to provide some kind of nifty service whilst also facilitating viral marketing.

All well and good, but eMarketer points out that marketers paying widget developers to create their widgets on a fee-per-install basis are often paying between $1 and $5 each time a user installs the marketer’s widget onto their social networking page or elsewhere. This may be significantly more than the value they derive from the average user (depending on the time frame in which they measure value)!

So while a widget may be exceptionally popular… the cost of having it widely installed may cancel out or significantly outweigh the revenues derived from those widget users. eMarketer also notes that installation is no guarantee of use - just because someone downloads and installs a widget, it doesn’t mean they actually use it… let alone buy the marketer’s products or services. Moreover, because some widget advertising is sold on a fee-per-install basis, it may be tempting for some widget makers to use deceptive tactics to get people to install widgets they’re unlikely to use.

My strong recommendation to Internet marketers: do your math. Consider your alternatives in terms of paying widget developers on a fee-per-install basis or hiring software developers on a regular software development fee basis. Then consider whether you’re likely to break even or profit from your widget, based on the potential value of your average customer over the relevant timeframe (e.g. a year or perhaps their lifetime).

Source: eMarketer, “Widgets vs. Budgets?”, eMarketer, July 15, 2008