The writer was Dan Ackerman Greenberg, co-founder of The Commotion Group and he got roasted alive for the ‘secrets’ he outlined.

The main reasons for this were to do with the underhand methods he described. What his views showed was that it was clearly possible to force something viral. What it also highlighted was the liklihood of being shown up if you did it badly – being seen as a charlatan is the last thing a big brand wants – particularly if they’re pushing their content in order to generate greater advocacy – it’s counter-productive.

There was another post I found recently which showed another way of doing it. Written by Kevin Nalts, a career marketer, on his blog willvideoforfood has written a 34 page booklet on how to promote your videos on YouTube. Called “How To Become Popular on YouTube (Without Any Talent)“, it explains how hard work, passion and dedication have made him the YouTuber he is today.

Both the above views should be read and digested. When it comes to promoting content on behalf of a brand a balance between the two views needs to be found. More often than not there simply isn’t the resource available to create the kind of YouTube persona that Kevin has achieved – it’s only over a long period of time and constant effort that he’s created the influence he has. More often than not agencies need to hire that kind of influence in the form of a guerilla marketing company along the lines of The Commotion Group.

However, there are a number of steps that can be taken to ensure content spreads successfully:

• Content - Is the subject matter and story compelling enough to get people to pass it along? This is a different question to whether or not it’s entertaining.
• Optimisation – This has to do with how long the clip is, how you optimize it, what tags you use, and when you submit it. In this regard, both Dan and Kevin have some excellent suggestions which are worth reading.
• Reach – This is a key element to getting a video viewed by as many people as possible. It boils down to finding the right influencers to pass it on. In Kevin’s situation he is the influencer. This is the best scenario – by truly spending the time to find people that the video will be relevant for. The worst way is to spam large groups of people; only a small percentage of whom will find it relevant, and to fabricate identities which leads to the 4th factor
• Inflation - This is where the views of Kevin & Dan vary the most. A key element of Dan’s strategy in making videos go viral amounts to Inflation. By gaining views by spamming friends, creating fake profiles and hiring ‘click monkeys’ it’s true that you do get better stats, sadly they are tactics that many SMO are employing, bringing the entire business sector down with them.

YouTube and others are investing a great deal of time and effort against fraudsters who employ inflation and spamming. Whilst it’s possible to create an approach that avoids necessitating use of Inflation, it may mean that you don’t reach that elusive 100,000 viewer mark.

At the end of the day, a much better metric for success is usually whether the right people saw the video, not whether the right number of people saw it…

“The more people you reach the more likely it is that you’re reaching the wrong people” – Seth Godin

YouTube is now an important teaching tool at UC Berkeley.

The school announced on Wednesday that it has begun posting entire course lectures on the Web’s No.1 video-sharing site.

Berkeley officials claimed in a statement that the university is the first to make full course lectures available on YouTube. The school said that over 300 hours of videotaped courses will be available at youtube.com/ucberkeley.

Berkeley said it will continue to expand the offering. The topics of study found on YouTube included chemistry, physics, biology and even a lecture on search-engine technology given in 2005 by Google cofounder Sergey Brin.

“UC Berkeley on YouTube will provide a public window into university life, academics, events and athletics, which will build on our rich tradition of open educational content for the larger community,” said Christina Maslach, UC Berkeley’s vice provost for undergraduate education in a statement.

What struck me when I visited the YouTube UC Berkeley page was how difficult it was to navigate and browse the 201 lectures that have been uploaded…It’s all well and good having a google search box, but go ahead and click ‘view all’ and you’re presented with 20 video thumbnails per page over 10 pages, with nothing chapterizing the content.

Whilst I think UC Berkeley have done something brilliant by offering this free learning, it just goes to show that YouTube is often not the best solution out there. Yes, it’s got eyeballs but that’s not so important when your content is this valuable. People will search for it and it’s the functionlaity of the player which will add value to the experience. To get an idea of what I mean consider this example.

What I find most interesting in comparing Veotag with Youtube is that the main difference is in the length of the content being played. YouTube is ideally suited to sub 10min viral content, whilst Veotag is much more suited to long form content – more than 30mins – which can be dipped in to.

It’s now launched a music video service which pulls in the majority of it’s content from YouTube, but significantly seems to be doing so in a more robust fashion than any of its competitiors such as iLike, and MOG. One of the other interesting competitior in the form of Vidora.tv. Now they’ve got a really bad design, but a very good Flex widget and a bunch of interesting things going on – well worth a look.
Techcrunch has an article on it.

MyStrands has always been a very interesting company for me, and that’s illustrated by their labs page.

I was very impressed with mystrands.tv:

Hotspots can be placed on points of interest throughout the entire video clip and tracked. The hotspots are designated with blinking circles; click on them in the video to access the author’s notes, tags and target links. (Here’s a version of the ‘Battle at Kruger’ YouTube video – which has had over 16millions views – but with added links through to the relevant Wikipedia pages)

Crucially, the service doesn’t require you to download separate software on to your desktop. Instead, you simply sign up and embed the videos as you would from any video source such as YouTube, MetaCafe, or Blip. Asterpix adds a separate invisible layer on top of the video that contains all the metadata (aka relevant linking information). Then just go ahead and drop it in your blog or on your MySpace page.

Asterpix’s technology could have big implications for online video-related advertising as it would allow advertisers to embed hotspots around products of high commercial value. For instance, Le Bron James videos could link his shoes to NikeTown stores, or Tiger Woods’ clips could help push golf clubs or even apparel.

All very cool and more impressive than anything I’ve seen so far.

Joost currently has over 238 channels and 10,298 programs – I don’t know how many hours that is, but they’re all fed into the Joost platform via Video Feed in the form of (RSS). OnTheToob enables you to own customized channels, interactive tags, and RSS feeds of the latest Joost content.

You can even enable programs you’ve selected to have their own ‘digg it’ button. Owning this is a smart move by Joost because there’s power in them there feeds…

Grassroots buzz and genuinely interesting sports are perfect for internet consumption. Think about televised Ultimate Frisbee tournaments or Roller Hockey…These are the types of programmes that have niche audiences and offer the ability to be experimented with.

I see huge potential in this space…

Barack Obama’s campaign team have chosen the only video player that has a way for bloggers to grab the code needed to embed his video into a post or web site. The video player is from Brightcove. You can also email it right from the video as well. And all of those emails still flow through his main website. He doesn’t have a blog at the moment.

This way you don’t have to have ever gone to Barack’s website to make this a viral success (and the campaign doesn’t want people going to the website, right now it’s about awareness) and this is the main reason why his video can be found far more than the other candidates (It would be good to get figures on this…Darren?).

Youtube’s page impressions and visitors are impressive – but they don’t matter unless Youtube keeps up with their competitors.

If there’s a video with the right tone and you encourage people to spread it – and they can do just that from the player – then I think they will and you’ll blitz the ‘net with more instances of the video player than unique views on youtube.

Hilary has gone for a more traditional media audience. She offers more videos from her site than any of the other candidates, and she also offers them in Quicktime format (can be used by the news stations and other traditional mediums – Flash can’t). But you can’t share these videos and Real player, which is used by her, is just as useless to news stations as Flash. What’s interesting is the selection of what is put onto YouTube and what isn’t.

She does have a blog and is responding to people’s comments – well at least someone is…And some of the most annoying animated gifs I’ve EVER seen!

Joe Biden’’s (didn’t even know about this guy…) website has a video player, but there’s no way to use it in blogs or even download it. The site itself has prominent links to YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and Flickr, but they feel like they were added as part of a “‘how to be relevant’” checklist. If it isn’’t real, people will see through it.

Having a web presence means something different in this election, and I would argue in elections to come. Having a site isn’’t enough any more. These candidates will need to deliver their messages in chunks, and make them available broadly. They need to be reaching audiences not just through The New York Times and CNN, but via blogs and iPods, zunes and PSPs as well . More than anything, they need to reach out to people and talk to them directly without all of the spin. In this election, I don’t believe they can hide behind well produced web sites and scripted media events and expect to win the general concensus. They really need to make themselves accessible.

Immediacy and reach will be defining moments during the election to a degree not seen before.

Despite being just under two years away, the candidates’ direct ability to communicate with and the voting population’s’ direct access to information, as it happens, without the media even having time to react and shape opinion, will have a profound impact.

The internet is in constant flux. Four years ago it was said that there were more web pages in cyberspace than pages ever written in any language – that’s a mindbending number of pages. I’d guess that this number has doubled again since.

In order to appeal to potential customers, brands come to agencies to have a unique and memorable experience created for them which increases their brands’ awareness.

Changes in user’s behaviour online, through community-based, user generated sites like MySpace and YouTube, which have hundreds of millions of visitors every day, have revolutionised the way in which audiences use and interact with the internet. They’re less inclined to visit branded experiences preferring to find and pass on the next funniest clip on YouTube or the next hit single on MySpace. Their behaviour is changing…I know mine is. I go to sites I find interesting and on something like YouTube there’s so much content, I’m becoming so used to using it that I’m put off by going anywhere else.

Using the technology that’s out there and understanding the nuances between the different offerings that there are, you can combine a memorable experience and have it be consumed by more.

For example, by providing teaser movies on YouTube, a YouTube user called lonelygirl15 acquired over 24 million cumulative views to her series of video blogs in little more than 6 months – the 1st episode was on the 18th June 2006. By August suspicions about the authenticity of lonelygirl15 fanned the flames of the rumour mill, only helping to increase the popularity of the program, and on the 15th September a post was left on the forum announcing that sure enough lonelygirl15 was in fact an actress called Jessica Rose and that the fictional series had been created by Ramesh Flinders, a screenwriter and filmmaker from Marin County, California, and Miles Beckett, a surgical residency dropout turned filmmaker. Despite this the series continues to run to this day.

This wouldn’t be that interesting until you find out that on the 9th September the videos were uploaded and streamed from Revver.com.

Now Revver is identical to YouTube in many ways, you can upload videos, it’s community driven and you’re able to copy and paste code which places the video player anywhere else on the internet. The difference between the two is that Revver offers an ad revenue payment model. Revver splits the ad revenue with the creators 50/50 – the more people watch it the more money you make, and anyone who ‘shares’ the video by placing a player pointing to it on their blog can also get in on the action. 24million page hits is alot of eyeballs and alot of money.

I guess my point is that it’s possible to be memorable and consumable – it’s called a hit. Be it a song or a tv series, both can be memorable and both are able to draw people in and engage them – They spread by word of mouth because they’re geniuinely good. I wonder whether anything along these lines would have worked out so well if the internet audience found out they’d had the wool pulled over their eyes by HBO or Channel4 (it’s going to happen at some point, mark my words). But even if they did, as long as the program stands up to criticism, I believe the audience will forgive them – they’ve forgiven lonelygirl15.

So why am I interested? Why am I so bothered? Last week AdAge published an article on DDB Chicago’s latest efforts to build an online TV network for Budweiser. The new beer tv network will have eight channels featuring comedy, reality and sports programming, with an emphasis on webisodes and humorous shorts.

There’s clearly huge interest from large brands to find a way into internetTV, online TV, “where all the kids are” TV – call it what you will, the marketing guys want in. I just find it funny that they’re going to traditional ad agencies for the answers when they clearly don’t have a clue about how these things work. DDB have seemingly hired some of the brightest comedy writers in America right now (Matt Piedmot, Producer & writer on Saturday Night Live) in order to create a online TV network channel – which you have to go to bud.tv to watch…Why aren’t they using what’s currently out there to integrate with how people are actually using the internet? This type of network is exactly what Brightcove offers, with an ad revenue model and the possiblity of syndication – why not use it like National Geographic, SkyOne have? Why re-invent the wheel?

Equally as important is the type of wheel you choose. If you’re Xbox and you want to have the Pinata cartoons made available for kids to download, Brightcove’s not the answer, blip.tv is. Blip.tv’s emphasis is on webisodes and RSS feeds. This means a series of programs can be uploaded and added to an RSS feed which kids can subscribe to and have automatically downloaded for them to their iTunes library in mp4 format to watch on long car journeys or the school bus via their iPod.

Likewise, if you want something to spread virally use Revver, it’s in the interests of those who choose to put it on their myspace page or blog to spread it – Revver offers them a revenue model for doing it – you actually get paid for spreading it.

By combining this kind of understanding with memorable and unique experiences for people, you’re offering the best of both. You’re using what’s out there in the best way possible, as a sign post to something more exclusive, more memorable, more niche…

InternetTV has been threatening the traditional networks since the advent of Tivo and I genuinely feel that we’re on the tipping point where InternetTV has an opportunity of moving into the TV space. The reason for this is the technology.

When Apple announced their iTV box it was the first indication that a soultion had been found for people to download high quality full screen video via a P2P network and experience it away from your computer in a ‘sit-back’ environment…and they’re not alone. Several competing boxes will be out on the shelves in the next 12 months enabling people to choose what they watch and when they watch it, offering them programs that they may like and recommending new programs based on their viewing habits and interests.

The other missing piece of this puzzle is the content itself…but that’s the fun bit, right?

These are some of the questions Brightcove is currently answering with its video distribution model. It is offering very adaptable solutions to very different types of content creators, from the big studios to web content creators. To me though, the content being distributed via Brightcove is of a higher caliber than what you find on YouTube. Think more along the lines of ‘channel’ creators rather than mobile phone mavericks with a video capability.
The truth is that there won’t be one single solution for such different content creators. The Long Tail will play its part, as will the ability for anyone to create their own schedule, rather than having one dictated to them because of ‘peak-time’ viewing – a tired revenue model which doesn’t have much longer.

Combine this with the fact that Flash 9 now enables full-screen playback and you’ve got a number of different revenue models catering for different types of content creator.

Brightcove’s going for the Long Tail whilst Apple’s going for the quality…I wonder which will win…