So … you came up with a great idea for a video to market your business, filmed it, edited it … but the internet has millions upon millions of videos vying for people’s attention, so how do you get your video noticed?

Here are a few tips and tricks to help your video “go viral”.

Video SEO / VSEO – Since Google’s introduction of Universal Search in 2007, which displays blended results from multiple databases, videos now appear prominently in standard Google searches. So make sure you incorporate a video site-map in your website’s HTML code and that you give your video an engaging, keyword rich title.

YouTube & Other Video-Sharing Sites – While Youtube remains the most popular video-sharing on the Internet by some way, there is a plethora of other increasingly popular video websites such as Vimeo and Daily Motion, so make sure you upload your video to as many of them as possible. To help create a buzz online, try to do this simultaneously and not over an extended period of time.

It’s also very important that you optimise your Youtube video correctly. Give it an attention-grabbing headline, include a description loaded with relevant keywords and choose the most relevant tags to your target audience.

An enticing thumbnail is also crucial! Youtube gives you the option of a frame at ¼, ½ and ¾ of the way through your video, so pick the best one. Or why not make sure that your editor places a shot you want use as a thumbnail at any one of these points?

Perhaps most importantly, make sure you check the videos settings, so sharing, downloading and embedding are allowed! The easier your video is to share, the more likely it will become popular. Sharing is what viral marketing is all about. Everything you do to make that easier is going to improve your campaign.

Get People Talking About It - E-mail a link to your video to as many relevant websites and blogs as you can. Sometimes all it takes is a single blogger to get your video moving.

Don’t just upload your video and forget it about it either. Comment on it yourself and start a conversation. Why not start new threads about the video on relevant forums too? You can also post the URL of your video as a response to other relevant videos that will be there for all visitors to see. Be as creative as like with the association.

Become part of the community.

Promote, Promote and Promote Some More – Send a good old-fashioned e-mail with a link to the video to everyone in your address book and encourage them to share it with their friends too.  Post a link to bookmarking sites like DIGG and promote it on your social networks like Facebook and Twitter. If you don’t have profiles on these sites, then sign up asap.

While there are no guarantees that your video will “go viral”, if you invest a bit of time and follow these steps, you give your video the very best chance possible.

Good luck! For a little inspiration, here's a great little video about "Extreme Recycling" currently do well online.

In the spirit of Viral Video Week here at Spectrecom, take a look at this hilarious spoof of an Academy Award-Winning movie trailer - "The 11th Best Picture Nomination of 2009". 

Produced by American comedy-duo BriTANicK - "Two Guys Wasting Thier Degrees" - this 3-minute video brilliantly sends up The Oscars, cliched movie trailers and the entire Hollywood film industry.

With nearly a million Youtube views and counting in just a week since its release, the video is currently riding high in every video viral chart. Click play to see why. 

To view some of their other funny videos and short films, click here. 

As discussed yesterday, a "viral video" is simply a video that becomes popular through the process of Internet sharing. There are no silver bullets to ensure your marketing videos “go viral”, but there are definitely a few golden rules.  Here they are.

Target Audience – Think carefully about who you want to watch your video and what action you want them to take having done so.  It’s crucial that you tailor your video’s style and content to appeal to the right people.  Consider age group, gender, location and tastes of the audience you want your video to connect with. 

Keep it Short – Successful viral videos are almost always short, usually just 1 or 2 minutes in length, if that. Online viewers have notoriously short attention spans, so keep it punchy to grab their attention.  If you do, they are likely to share your video across multiple social networking sites, quickly generating good momentum and potentially millions of views for your video marketing campaign. 

Make It Funny – Humour is often key to a successful video viral. Many of the most effective video viral campaigns have been driven by making people laugh.  People like to be entertained. There’s only one thing they like more – entertaining their friends. Make somebody laugh and the chances are they’ll want to do the same for their friends and will share your video with them. 

Distribute it Properly – So … you’ve made your video, but how do make sure it gets noticed in a crowded online world? If you put the video on your own website, even on the homepage, the chances are that unless your site already has a loyal following of thousands, it probably won’t get picked up by the right people. What you need to do is propagate the video across the Internet’s many video-sharing platforms. There’s a lot more out there than Youtube you know! You should also be posting news of the video’s release to you or your company’s blog, twitter feed and social networking profiles like Facebook.

No Hard Sell  - People watch videos to be entertained, not to discover information about a company’s products and services. They have to want to watch the video for its own entertainment value. If you give them the hard sell and bombard them information, you might as well not bother. They probably won’t watch it to the end, and are very unlikely to share it. 

Production Values – Don’t worry too much about production values. Your video needs to been watchable, with decent sound, but a good idea far outweighs shooting on a REDONE.

You can never guarantee that a video will “go viral”, but if you follow these guidelines, you’ll give it every chance. If it does, viral video marketing can be one of the most cost-effective online marketing solutions around. But don’t put all your eggs in one basket though, viral videos should be one element of comprehensive marketing strategy, and not the main focus of it.

The real beauty is that viral videos mean that even the smallest business can compete online with the largest corporations. There are plenty of video production companies out there who will produce videos for you and many of them are worth working with, but if you have a good idea and video camera, you can do it yourself.

I hope you found this article useful, come back tomorrow for some top tips on how on how to get your video noticed online. In the meantime, here's a great video from BMW that's currently doing well very online. 

Commercial marketing videos that “go viral” can bring companies and organisations a huge amount of PR value, in the form of online visibility, brand recognition and website hits, often for a very small cost. But how does a marketing video “go viral” and why are some videos more successful than others?

A "viral video" is simply a video that becomes popular through the process of Internet sharing and to understand how they work, it’s important to look at how they began.  Viral videos predate video sharing sites like Youtube that we are all now familiar with and began with inbox-to-inbox e-mail sharing. 

One of the first known examples was “Dancing Baby” (above), when in 1996 animator Ron Lussier forwarded a video he'd created around his workplace, which was then circulated widely across the Internet via e-mail. Today however, sharing videos via e-mail still happens, but it’s been dwarfed by the sharing of videos across social networking websites like Facebook or Twitter, and the many video-sharing sites that have sprung up since the inception of Youtube.

The fundamental premise of viral marketing has in fact been around for much longer than inbox-to-inbox sharing: word-of-mouth. All that’s changed is the conversations are now happening online and across a much larger geographical area. Every good marketer knows that word-of-mouth can be an incredibly powerful marketing tool and what the web does is amplify that power, potentially many times over. Videos are simply a strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence; and hopefully driving people to your website where they can learn more about what it is your offering.

If somebody enjoys watching your video, the chances are that they’ll immediately share it with their friends, who in turn, will share it with their friends too.  If the video really captures people’s imagination the process becomes self-perpetuating and creates a real buzz online, quickly becoming part of multiple online discussions. Here's a great example of marketing video that instantly went viral from Honda:

An integral element of the process is that when somebody shares a video, the people they share them with are usually part of a broadly similar demographic, in terms of age, gender, interests, purchasing power and taste. This means that the video is being seen by exactly the right people, who are also likely to have an interest in your company’s products or services.

Many videos will “go viral” unexpectedly and / or organically; and one video is usually more successful than another simply because it strikes a chord and captures people’s imaginations. However today, successful viral video marketing campaigns often rely upon a carefully planned distribution strategy too (something I'll be going into more about later in the week); and an entire industry has also evolved over the last few years, which produces and distributes “viral” videos on behalf of business and organisations.

Here's the third sneak preview from Mark Jackson's feature-length comedy film "Silly Billy - A Punk Musical".

It's a scene where a girl punk rock - played by Rachel Bright (Kelly), Victoria Gaskell-Watkins (Roxy), Eleanor Lawrence (Dixie) and Roxanne Saili (Trisky) - perform a song called "Woman Killer, recorded 'live' by the cast with a little help from Simon Duckworth.

Mark is a member of Spectrecom's creative team and has a fantastic track record in making highly original comedy films on a budget! He's been working on "Silly Billy" for the last couple of years. It's all in the can, editing is nearly complete and will be officially released at some point in 2010

Mark is currently selling credits and VIP perks on the film to raise some funds to complete the post-production.

To find out more check out www.sillybillymovie.com or take a look at his website: www.jacksonfilm.co.uk