A week has passed since we started promoting our video. And I can tell everyone that it was indeed An Experience. Promotion may sound simple but, just like other things, it is easier said than done. I will be enumerating the different strategies and tactics that we used to make our video blog viral.

1. Go where the crowd is.

The simplest of all strategies is to spot where most people could go and promote it there. Moreover, we spotted a “primetime block” where most people go online. With this, we armed different social networking sites such as Friendster (yes, we still promoted it there), Multiply, Facebook, Plurk and Twitter with our video link. But, we didn’t do it right away. We waited for the “primetime”. We pulsed these social networking sites and they peak user traffic at around 8pm. Ergo, we implement our tactic 10 minutes before or after that optimum time.

2. Go where the heart is.

Of course, our video has an umbrella theme: Sex. We assumed that people interested in sex will likely view our video. Nah, when I say “interested about sex” it doesn’t mean “looking for sex”—I think they’re different. Anyway, what we did is to look for YouTube videos related to sex or sex culture. Then, we posted our video as a video response.

Moreover, we searched WordPress blogs and/or blog entries that are about sex.  We reply to the blog entry and drive the conversation to sex and culture. Then, we suggest the video link (how clever!). Compared to tactic number 1, this tactic is more targeted.

Viral

Make sure the "virus" is doing the right job

3. Treat viewers as guests.

Some viewers leave comments about the video in your preferred video sharing site. What our group did is to make sure that every comment posted will be answered. Why? This drives them back to the video page (that’s one view higher) or it could give them the gusto to share and promote the video (that’s could be a lot of views higher). We start conversations then we slowly ask them nicely to promote our video. Think courtship. :)

4. Let Google crawl the video.

Ms Ingrid told us that search engines cannot crawl images, flash animations and even videos. But, there is a way to make the video relevant to these search engine spiders. How?

  1. Creating Video and Blog Entry Tags
  2. Writing a video transcript alongside the video itself

The first one is basic. The second one is radical and not recommended for all video blogs. Our video blog consists of pure, trivial and informational, one-liners. This feature of our video made it easy for us to make a transcript and actually embed it as a blog entry together with the video itself.

5. Make it plenty but with a strategy.

My group mates and I had a tendency to overdo promotion like flooding everyone with our YouTube link. But come on, not everyone clicks the link or, worse, some people may get irritated because of the flood in their respective walls. So what we did is to make each promotion or link distribution with a different message to say. For example “Let’s put the X in SEX” or “This is sex in a different position”. We also had teasers “The Aweikoma of Brazil has the same words for ‘sex’ and ‘eating’. More Sex Facts here!” Lastly, to give credit to the ones who commented to our video, we quote them and make that quotation as a link: “The function of sex as a procreation activity became a secondary one (Magicboy, 2009). Join the conversation! Watch Sex Trip!”

On video count alone, I can say that we are the one of the videos with the most number of views among the class, but of course, we need to make sure that the quality of our strategies are at par with our view count. There are two basic questions a viral video blogger must answer: 1) Does my video receive a lot of video hits? 2) Are those hits relevant to my objectives? Most people fail on the second question.