Rebecca Appleton has written a great piece in the Search Engine Standard outlining seven tips for successful video optimization.

In this context, optimization means both optimizing video content for the search engines and for a marketing benefit in general.

Last week the Starbucks Coffee chain launched an interesting offline ad campaign in the U.S. In fact, it’s an offline campaign aimed at encouraging viral world of mouth online, specifically via social media.

Starbucks erected posters in six major U.S. cities and challenged people to look for the posters ‘tweet’ about them on Twitter.

The posters are text-heavy explanations of Starbucks’ merits as a coffee purveyor and company. The text talks about how Starbucks chooses only premium coffee beans, carefully roasts them, and even how the company gives its part-time workers health insurance.

Screenwriter William Goldman is known for saying ‘nobody knows anything’ when it comes to developing a blockbuster movie. The same could be said for developing a successful viral marketing campaign.

Everyone can look back and tell you why something was successful… but few marketers can come up with a hit viral marketing campaign time after time. You just don’t always know what will go viral, and what won’t.

But that’s no reason not to have a go!

If you’ve had success with a viral video i.e. an online video that’s gone viral, there’s good reason to create a sequel or related video. Chances are, if your second video goes viral, you’ll bring more people back to your first video, re-igniting the popularity and ‘virility’ of that video too!

It seems logical – not least because of YouTube’s ‘related videos’ feature – and some data from TechCrunch bears this out…

I have a theory about marketers. More than most, we LOVE great marketing and we hate bad marketing. ‘Great’ and ‘bad’ being subjective of course! Anyway, on Monday I received an email from Borders Bookstores and from the moment I saw the email I was hooked.

Look at the following screen grab of the email to see why (depending on your email program, you may need to manually load or allow images to display. I promise you, it’s worth it).

You’ve seen the videos… you’ve downloaded the free report… and you’ve heard me rave about StomperNet and Paul Lemberg’s Formula 5 online business growth program.

Well, Formula 5 launches today, Monday January 19, at 3pm Eastern. If you’re even slightly interested in this program you’ll want to be at the StomperNet Formula 5 sales page at 3pm.

Go here now:

==> StomperNet Formula 5 Kikabink Affiliate Link

The opening keynote address at the recent Add-on-Con conference (December 11, 2008, Mountain View, California) focused on how to make money producing and/or distributing browser add-ons.

You know, those cool little add-ons or ‘plugins’ such as the Alexa toolbar or SEO for Firefox.

The consensus was that, in general, the same monetization methods available for websites are available for browser add-ons. The models cited included selling ad space (i.e within the add-on), promoting affiliate products, and building and selling add-ons to other companies.

A study of 15,727 people by BIGresearch has found that, after face-to-face communication, email is the most popular method used by U.S. adults to talk about products.

While 67 percent of Americans use face-to-face discussions, a significant 52.8 percent use email, followed by telephone (50.2 percent), mobile phone (29.6 percent), instant messaging (13.8 percent), text messaging (10.8 percent), online communities (8.8 percent), blogging (4.1 percent) and other (2.2 percent).

The popularity of the various channels differs between age groups, with channels such as the mobile telephone, instant messaging and online communities much more popular among those aged 18-24 compared with those in other age groups. Email, however, remains the second most popular discussion medium for all age groups except for those aged 65 and over.

While 56.4 percent of those 65 and over use the telephone to discuss products, slightly less (53.4 percent) use email!

For Internet marketers, this is a strong indication that the best way to harness viral marketing is to do so by encouraging or facilitating word-of-mouth by email.

Source: eMarketer, “E-Mail Effective with Boomers,” eMarketer, December 11, 2008

Viral marketing is often referred to as a ‘free’ method of generating traffic. The reality is that the most effective viral marketing campaigns require some investment – and sometimes significant investment – in terms of ‘seeding’.

Indeed, as MarketingSherpa has found – and has published in its first Video Marketing Benchmark Guide – ‘the best way to promote free video is to pay for it’, with paid-search being the most effective promotional tactic.

The table below shows the effect of various promotional tactics on the success of viral video campaigns. Not only does it indicate that paid methods work best, but that using multiple tactics are likely to yield the greatest success.

Source: MarketingSherpa, “New Chart: Paid Search Tops List of Marketing Tactics for Viral Success,” MarketingSherpa, December 9, 2008

Contagion Media is addressing one of the biggest challenges of creating viral games: the expense. The U.K. based company is offering a menu of Flash based games that anyone can rent and customize for their campaigns.

Using Contagion Media’s solution, Internet marketers can upload their own artwork and manage add-ons such as prize pyramids, tournaments and multi- player games.

Sounds good… as long as everyone in the same niche doesn’t start re-skinning the SAME games.

Source: Helen Leggatt, “Viral games for hire from Contagion Media,” BizReport, December 1, 2008