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.)