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