This post is the third in a series of four about viral video marketing. The first post, Viral Video Marketing - Creating a Strategy, covered the necessary steps needed to create a viral video strategy. The second post Viral Video Marketing - Creating the content, reviewed the emotional appeal of video, the types of videos you can create, and other considerations of video production. The final post will cover measurement insights that we have either learned through practice, or are widely recognized as best practices.

A video will go viral if the number of people that share it is greater than the number of people that initially viewed it. For this to happen, two things need to be true:

1. The content should be share-worthy: viewers must feel compelled to share the content with their friends and colleagues.  
2. The video needs to be viewed in the proper channels: share-worthy content will not go viral unless it is broadcasted on a platform where influencers can view it. 

The last blog post discussed important things to consider when creating viral content. The first blog post briefly discussed the groundwork necessary to properly land content, but didn't go into too much detail.

How to Identify Channels and Influencers 

Develop a persona for your ideal viewers. Knowing who you are targeting will help you identify the proper influencers (those that will actually share your content) across channels.  

Set up a system to listen to the web. There are many tools that are designed to help you understand where people are discussing topics related to your brand online. Through keyword monitoring, you will be able to indentify the individuals who are most active in the conversations regarding your brand. This by no means is a comprehensive list, but it is a good start. 

1. The first step is setting up a central hub where all your pre-defined keyword mentions are aggregated. Google Reader is easy to use for this. Once you define your keywords in the search engines below you can subscribe to their RSS feeds which will automatically send search results to your central hub. 
2. Use Google Alerts to track mentions of your product/service, brand, competitors brand, and other keywords across the web. 
3. Twitter's search function is also an easy way to track mentions across twitter. Evaluate the users discussing your brand and start engaging with them before your content launches. It can also be helpful to search within user profiles to find demographics and social groups that fit within your target market. FollowWonk allows you to search within Twitter bios. 
4. If your industry or product is commonly discussed on message boards, Boardtracker is a useful tool to find keywords in forum threads. 
5. Sites like Technorati and BlogPulse tracks buzz and searches for trends that pertain to your company.

Engage with influencers prior to launching content. Once you have identified the top percentage of individuals who influence the social communities important to your brand, the next step involves active engagement. A basic rule to understand about the majority of influencers is that most are motivated by fame. Calling out top influencers or giving them a thumbs up publicly on social media sites will further deepen the relationship you are cultivating with them. Portraying transparency and authenticity through your social media communication is key to building trust with your influencers.  

Push your content out once it launches. Bloggers and social media writers crave content. Since we have already taken the time to develop relationships with influencers, the possibiliy of getting a repost or mention when we send these individuals your video is much higher. Think of it as a warm lead as opposed to a cold call. In addition to directly seeding the video with influencers, post the video on bookmarking sites like Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon; multi-media sites like TubeMogul which pushes content out to all the mainstream video sharing sites; and traditional social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  

Other things to keep in mind. If something with the launch goes haywire there are five keys to resolving any crisis that may arrive

1. Respond with lightning-speed 
2. Provide hyper-transparency 
3. Get ready for a two-way dialogue 
4. Understand that reputations are built and broken in search (very difficult to dislodge content once it is in search results) 
5. Don't underestimate the power of your detractors (everyone has the resources to be an influencer in their social circle. Don't blow anyone off.)

This post is the second in a series of four about viral video marketing. The first post, Viral Video Marketing - Creating a Strategy, covered the necessary steps needed to create a viral video strategy. The next posts will cover implementation and measurement insights that we have either learned through practice, or are widely recognized as best practices.

Once a strategy is in place and accepted by the necessary stakeholders, the next step is to determine the approach and create the content. Creative content is critical to viral success - people do not share or engage with mediocre content. Videos typically go viral when they appeal to a person's emotions - these emotions could include joy, sadness, delight, surprise, etc. Just make sure there is a clear emotional appeal, and that these emotions are inline with your brand.

Understand the Keys to Success

After you define your emotional appeal, understand how other companies have achieved success using these emotions. Visible Measures, ReelSEO, and Mashable Video all have regular features about viral videos. You can also check out the Category section on YouTube. Try to notice common themes among the top featured videos. For example, I've noticed that some viral vlogs incorporate comments from viewers into future vlogs. Doing this builds audience engagement and active viewers, and active viewers will send videos along to their friends.

Writing Content

The next step is to start concepting. Of course, we'd recommend partnering with an experienced viral video production agency to develop concepts, but here are a few ideas to get you started if you plan to make a humorous viral video:

1. Parody: Is there a video that is really hot right now? Create a parody to try to build off their fame. The key to a successful parody is speed and quality. You'll need to produce this quickly - the original video still needs to be popular for a parody to take off. It should also be as funny or funnier than the original. If the humor quality isn't up to snuff, then the video will fall flat and may even tarnish your brand. 
2. Stunt: A stunt video shows some kind of newsworthy or novel action, typically featuring your product. The most successful example of this is Blendtec's "Will it Blend" videos. The key to their continued success is that they are blending newsworthy objects - whenever a new iPhone comes out, Blendtec is quick to blend one.  
3. Prank: A viral video that shows a prank needs to be hilarious to go viral. The other side of the coin is the shock video - this is when a prank or a stunt goes horribly wrong, so much that the audience is shocked.  
4. Celebrity: If you are lucky enough to have celebrity friends that will endorse your product, you'll have a quick way to get views. Celebrities already have a fan base, so appealing to that base could help your views and viral potential. 
5. Original story: This is the most ambitious of the above approaches, since you will likely need to partner with an agency or scriptwriter and hire actors. Think about this approach as making a mini-film or broadcast commercial. But with the added investment, could come a huge payoff. 

Other Considerations

1. Will you need to hire talent? 
2. Where will the video be shot? Do you need to secure a location or a studio? 
3. Will there be one video or a series of videos?  
4. Is it all live action? Or will you need animation as well? Or is it all animation? 
5. What equipment will you need? 
6. Are there other licensing considerations? 

Creative content is the first part of the puzzle. The next blog in this series will cover the second part - landing the content for viral success.

Michelle and Rich discuss KFC's viral video depicting a shark attack in an Amsterdam canal.

Shark Attack in Amsterdam Canal Martini Media Vlog from Martini Media on Vimeo.

Here is the original video.

We often praise video as the most cost-effective use of marketing dollars - it is a piece of content that you can use in multiple channels without more production costs. The most obvious use for video is on a company website, but there are multiple other channels both on and offline where you can use video at no additional cost.

Company Website: We encourage our clients to use their video on their homepage, but there are other areas on a website where video should also be used.

1. Product pages: Did you know that using video on a product page increases a customer's likelihood to buy? If your video could also be a product demo, place the video on the page where your customer is likely to make a buying decision. 
2. Customer testimonial: Having a customer testimonial in text is one thing, but seeing and hearing praise come directly from the customer is another. Create customer testimonial videos to show potential customers how great real people think your product or service is. 
3. Other pages: Make a video about your company and put it on your About Us page, or create a video case study. Both types of video are great ways to show and tell your story quickly. 

Social Networks and Blogs: Use video to enrich your social profiles, and encourage employees and customers to share with their networks. You can also add a YouTube application to your Facebook page to enrich the user experience. LinkedIn now allows companies to create "Custom Company Profiles" that allow users to upload more modules including a video about your company. This can be a great way for potential employees and partners to get to know more about what you do. Also be sure to send a link your video to popular bloggers in your industry, including a brief description of why it is newsworthy.

Video Shares: YouTube is the king, but other video shares appeal to niche social networks. We use TubeMogul to push content out - it is an easy way to post and track video content across multiple shares. However, you may consider uploading some videos to networks individually - this will allow you to adjust file names and titles to target to multiple audiences. See our Beginner's Guide to Video SEO for more info 

Email: Email is a great way to connect with current and potential customers that may not regularly visit your website. Some email services, like Eyejot, allow you to embed video directly into your email. 

Local Search: Enhance your local listings with video. Right now, Google Places is the only of the big three search engines that allows you to add video to your local profile for free. Although it has not been proven yet, some experts have suggested that video may help improve your visibility in local search results. 

Tradeshows: Showing video in your tradeshow booth is a great way to attract attention and start a conversation. Some tradeshows have restrictions on audio in booths, so be sure to either include captions in your video or provide headphones for your visitors.

Sales Meetings: Arm your sales force with the video to add to their sales presentation. Just like on a website, a video is a great way to give potential customers a quick overview of your company, product, or service, leaving more time for sales people to answer questions and sell product.

Any more suggestions? Leave them in the comments!

This post is the first in a series of four about viral video marketing. We'll discuss strategy, content, and implementation insights that we have either learned through practice, or are widely recognized as best practices.

Every viral video campaign should begin not with the content, but with a strategy. The best content could fall flat if it isn't inline with the greater marketing strategy and company goals. Viral video marketing strategy should include measurable goals, defined integration to a company's overall marketing strategy, and a strategy to land the content with your audience.

Define Goals

Strategy begins with goals - typical goals used to be to drive traffic to a website with the purpose of making a sale or some other kind of conversion. With more sophisticated tools and analytics, goals can also include awareness, sentiment, or engagement shifts.

1. Awareness: You have a new product and would like to create some awareness. Your goal is to get as much exposure as possible in your target audience, and probably to dive traffic back to a website to find out more information.
2. Sentiment: You have a product that exists in a competitive marketplace. Your goal is to change the sentiment around your product in your target audience.
3. Engagement: You'd like users to become more engaged with your product or brand. Your goal is to use video to elicit a call to action for your users to create their own content around your product, submit to a contest, or perform another action that requires engagement with your company (not necessarily a purchase though).

Integrate with Greater Marketing/PR Strategy

Video should raise some questions - after all, you do want your audience to be intrigued/amused/delighted enough to perform another action after viewing the video. However, your video content should not be so disconnected that you leave your viewers confused. Before creating any content, make sure you communicate with marketing and PR to understand what your key company messages are, who your audience is, and what their goals are. Your video should fit in somewhere in this overall strategy.

Identify Channels to Land the Content

A video will likely not go viral unless you understand the mindset of your core demographic and there is a strategy in place before production to land the content. First, identify the channels your company currently engages in. If your audience is engaging somewhere else, you need to start building trust in those channels. During the strategy phase, identify who the key influencers are in each channel, and if possible, understand what their preferences are. If your content appeals to them, chances are it will receive their endorsement and appeal to their audience.

We recommend writing a clear strategy document, and having this document approved by the marketing team. If the strategy is in place and agreed upon, then the content creation and implementation processes will go much smoother down the road.

Wieden and Kennedy's most recent YouTube response videos for Old Spice will likely be called the most successful social media campaign for a while. And it is well-deserved - over three days, the team at W+K and actor Isaiah Mustafa produced over 180 video responses to bloggers, influencers, and other commenters on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Yahoo and other social networks. While the execution is certainly innovative, they started off the same as other campaigns - with great content.

It seems to us that The Man Your Man Could Smell Like started off as an evolution of other W+K characters for Old Spice. He started off in a spot called Different Scents.

There are several noticeable parallels between these ads. First, the language is very similar among the two ads - these men are confident and powerful, sportsmen and lovers. Second, the structure and sets of the ads both feature the main character pass from set to set without disruption. It's as if the scenery is moving around these powerful characters.

The next ads that appeared were the Odor Blocker ads created by W+K and Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim of the Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job.

These ads star President Camacho, er, Terry Crews and illustrate Old Spice's odor blocking qualities in true Tim and Eric farcical style. I love these ads, but I can see how they might be a bit over the top for some viewers. They got a lot of buzz though, and each ad has between one to five million views on YouTube.

However, W+K and Old Spice finally hit platinum with The Man Your Man Could Smell Like.

The first video has almost fourteen million views on YouTube as of July 16 - I'm sure in the coming weeks it will far surpass that number. How is this video different to make it more successful than the others? This was the first ad that appeared to speak to women. Mustafa starts the ad with "Hello Ladies," then speaks to them for the rest of the ad. Is the ad targeted at women though? Not necessarily, but in Mustafa, W+K seems to have found the perfect "men want to be him, women want to be with him" type of guy. He is perfect mix of bravado and romance.

Once W+K had a hugely successful hit on their hands, they kept the formula. They expanded their social media activities and launched a hugely successful, cross-platform social media campaign from July 12th to the 14th. They had the advantage of starting with widely recognized, well-received content, so they're potential to go viral really depended on how wide of a net they cast. They reached out to a wide variety of bloggers, celebrities, and technophiles. He even helped a guy out with his marriage proposal (she said yes). They made viral video in real time.

W+K has set the bar for social media. They fused viral content with the real time web, and had amazing results. The only question left to ask is what's next?

Google made some big announcements at their IO conference last month around the launch of their new and improved search engine. The new search engine, dubbed "Caffeine," provides 50 percent fresher results, taking into account not only relevant content, but also the different types of content that exists online.

Google used to weigh types of content differently, but now it is all added into their index continually. What does this mean for any business that has a web presence? First, fresh, relevant content is key. Second, the variety of that content is also going to matter more. Lastly, you need to make sure you have a way to tell the search engines what type of content you have and how fresh it is. This is where Sitemaps come into play.

Good SEOs always include a Sitemap.xml file to tell the search engines about the types of pages on their site and how often they are updated. At IO, Google's Matt Cutts said webmasters will also want to start getting their video Sitemaps ready for future updates, indicating that more importance will be placed on different types of content.

There are two ways you can go about creating a video Sitemap. The first option is to create a separate document following the Sitemap Protocol. If you go this route, you will have to continually update your Sitemap every time you add video to your site. Or, you can integrate a Sitemap with your CMS system, so that the fields continuously populate and the Sitemap updates itself. This will require more development work (or partnering with an agency like us), but it can save you a lot of time as your develop your video library. Google announced yesterday that you can also integrate different types of content into one Sitemap, so you can have one document that covers all content.

Does it work? You bet. Within a week of submitting our video sitemap to Google, we started noticing that we were receiving search traffic directly to our video content. And after performing test searches, we noticed our videos in our video production gallery appearing in search results along side YouTube and other video shares.

Now is the time to get ahead of the game. These changes are either happening or about to happen, so if you aren't using video on your website, start creating video content to publish online. If you have some video, continue to build your library and use video Sitemaps to alert search engines about your content.

Position: Social Media Intern

Location: Seattle, WA
Status: Internship
Duration: 10 weeks
Start date: Immediately
Pay: $150/week stipend
Experience: None Required

Martini Media, a full-service video production and video marketing agency based in Seattle, WA, seeks a social media intern for internal and client projects. Martini Media provides business films, viral videos and viral marketing consulting for companies of all sizes.

General Description: We are looking for a  Social Media intern to help with monitoring and engaging in social media activities. Through the use of monitoring software, we create a surplus of aggregate information surrounding a brand or company. We need a detail-oriented wordsmith who has a strong understanding of social media activities. This is an internship position however you will be compensated with $150 per week and a generous amount of fun.

Internship Duties:
Monitor keywords searches
Communicate effectively within the blogosphere and social media networks
Engage with market influencers
Generate content and push out to appropriate channels


Other Required Characteristics/Skills
Sense of humor
Strong writing skillz
Addiction to Facebook, Twitter, Digg or any other social media outlets
Lust for the Internet

Please send resumes to Elizabeth (elizabeth@martinidesign.com) or MacKenzie (mackenzie@martinidesign.com).

This Saturday is the Second Annual Hope Gala, the American Cancer Society's premier gala event in Seattle. We are fortunate to have been involved with the Gala since the inaugural event last year, but this year was a little more special for us.

As many of you know, our director Rich found out he had cancer shortly after last year's Gala. We were able to see the help that the ACS provides to cancer patients and their families, free of charge. We created a video to tell Rich's story, and also provide a call to action for people that want to help.

Seattle Cancer Benefit Gala - 2010 ACS Hope Gala from Martini Media on Vimeo.

The great news is that there are still tickets available for this year's event! For more information, visit the Gala homepage or keep up with the latest news on Facebook or Twitter. For last minute ticket purchase, contact Sally Bose at 206.674.4162 or reach her by email.

So YouTube has finally added a video editing capability. It's actually pretty snazzy, though its not likely to revolutionize video editing in general, but it does give you some added creative possibilities with your online videos.

Up till now, all you could do was upload to YouTube whatever video you've got, whether its something taken with a point and shoot in a dark bar or your film school magnum opus, and that's that. Hopefully you'd remember to actually title it something. In that case you were way ahead of the game compared to most. 

Now, you have the added capability of taking pieces of your uploaded videos and combining them into whatever new videos you'd like to create. Kind of like a DJ mash up, a VJ mash up if you will (Bonus points to anyone who remembers where the term VJ actually originated from). You can take cuts from a single video multiple times and just keep repeating their placements in the timeline to create a shorter, condensed, and better edited version of the video, and also combine other video footage with it. It's actually pretty cool.

Audio is a bit tricky, unless you want to replace the sound entirely from YouTube's built in library. That'll put some banner advertisements on your page, but music is definitely an added plus considering there really isn't any special audio editing you can do. So unless you like abrupt sound cuts and audio spikes, I suggest rethinking your opinion on montages. They maybe cliche, but they always work in a pinch.

Some of you maybe thinking you can now create a completely new video from scratch using this new YouTube feature as an "online video editor," but that's really not the case. In theory you could try, but it would be a pretty painstaking process, especially if you've got a lot of footage to parse and edit. But if you have only a few clips of video you'd like to string together, this new YouTube editor will do just that.

Overall, a much needed and appreciated extra perk from the folks at YouTube.