A few weeks back, there was athunderstorm at TechCrunch regarding an article about how to make videos more viral. The guest post was written by Dan Ackerman Greenberg, a 22-year old Stanford graduate student and CEO of a company that helps make videos viral. His stated goal was to give the reader an insight into how to make videos more popular — he likens it to SEO for videos, arguing that companies need to understand video virality optimisation strategies as part of their online marketing campaigns.

It seems like he knows what he’s doing. His company has helped six videos to achieve:

• 6 million views on YouTube
• ~30,000 ratings
• ~10,000 favorites
• ~10,000 comments
• 200+ blog posts linking back to the videos
• All six videos made it into the top 5 Most Viewed of the Day, and the two that went truly viral (1.5 million views each) were #1 and #2 Most Viewed of the Week.

Among his key insights is that content isn’t king (this is what makes his job seem a little slimy). In his words, although great content is cool, it’s not essential to making a video really viral. There’s a process to making a video viral, and that process is often a lot more important than the content itself.

This seems somewhat unmeritocratic and counter to the point of community-based voting systems. You want the see the best content, as voted by an objective set of your peers, not as manipulated by clever viral marketing experts.

The post got 515 comments, a second post in which Dan responded to the attacks that people like him corrupt the purity of video sites like YouTube by manipulating users into viewing mediocre content (I guess the general reaction was that it’s like those SEO people who try to trick Google and eventually get punished for corrupting the results.), and an interview with CNN.

Michael Arrington posted a somewhat dramatic comment noting that “frankly I’m disgusted by this”.

But as they say in politics, “all press is good press”. Controversy is an effective marketing tool. This kid is now on the map, and I’m sure that lots of companies will be calling him. Random people like me are blogging about him and thinking about how much we need someone like him for our companies, even if there is something slightly unsavoury about “artificially” making your video popular.

But isn’t that the definition of a marketing campaign? Artificially making something popular? Isn’t all marketing/advertising on some level invasive/misleading/untruthful/manipulative? Maybe that’s what Mark Zuckerberg is learning given the backlash against Beacon . . . .

When I first heard about SEO, I thought it was “shady”, because it tried to manipulate Google’s results for corporate gain. And I guess I have the same feeling about Dan’s company.

But now I realise that start-ups like mine live or die by SEO. Manipulating Google (within their self-imposed limits) is the name of the game. And the same will probably be increasingly true about videos.

That’s marketing, folks!

So with that in mind, I’ve posted two videos:

• Dan’s interview on CNN explaining his vision of SEO for videos; and
• a video that various French friends have been sending me about a musical group that performed on the subway in Paris. Their video already has more than 1 million hits on YouTube! It’s obviously a viral marketing campaign to promote an upcoming album, as was the performance on the train. It’s a cool little video that cost absolutely nothing to make, but who knows. Maybe Dan’s company helped them make it popular on YouTube . . . .

Naturally 7 (live on the Paris subway)

Dan Greenberg on CNN, SEO for videos

Day 2 at OJObuscador was quite different from Day 1, which was all about the search engines and what they have planned for 2007. Day 2 was all about i) organic positioning; ii) marketing online; and iii) i.r. / usability. I generally found the Day 2 conferences to be informative but lower on the “wow” factor.

My general impressions:

• Javi Casares seems to always be in a good mood, even as he is running a pressure-filled conference with hundreds of attendees. That’s to be commended, as was the quality of the OJObuscador conference.
• The SEO/SEM market in Spain is in a very early state of development, and neither Spanish companies nor Spanish users are pressuring SEOs to improve. Spanish companies are generally waking up to the marketing opportunities presented by the Internet, but they are more accustomed to SEM-type approaches (a fixed budget for short-term results) than to SEO (optimizing a site for mid-to-long term benefit). But even if an SEM approach is chosen, a lot of companies might waste money on overly simplistic SEM campaigns that fail to monitor actively the campaign’s return on investment (ROI) or otherwise track the campaign’s success. So Google gets rich, but maybe your company doesn’t get the exposure it needs/deserves/has paid to get. On the other hand, Spanish users are not as demanding as users in other countries, which means that in general the Spanish SEO/SEM market is not as dynamic and professional as it could be–the bar is a lot lower.
• The best way to guarantee an SEO/SEM’s ability to hit your targets is to request a list of past sites on which he or she has worked. Otherwise, you might pay someone a lot of $$ but not get useful results.
• If you ever want to hire an SEO/SEM specialist, do a search and see how prominently the specialist shows up in various search engines. A supposed SEO/SEM expert should know how to be listed on the first page of Google and the other major search engines. If your expert doesn’t rank properly, ditch him.