Preneur Marketing - The Blog of Entrepreneur Pete Williams

Hey Nez,

Thanks for this… I’m not exactly sure what to ask, but I am keen to hear what you did, why you did it and how you did it… I same kinda questions I’d ask Paris Hilton really..

(anyway I’ll spice/clean the wording of the questions up for the blog)

1. So Andrew, tell us why you decided to put a video of a man running naked on YouTube?

Being a fan of cricket and a follower of what’s going on in the news, I had a pretty fair idea that this would be a very popular video clip around the country for the next week or so. I knew it would be an ‘around-the-watercooler’ story that everyone would want to see. These days, if you want to find a clip of something quick, you go to You Tube. So what I really was trying to achieve was a test to see if my intuition was right, Aussies like the combination of nudity and sport.

1b. For the American readers, what the heck is this baseball-wanna-be sport called Cricket all about?

Funny you asked that question, as when the video starting hitting number one lists globally it was suddenly on the radar for a lot of U.S viewers. The comments (ended up with over 1000 of them) were collectively in 3 categories: why cricket sucks, what the hell is cricket, and cricket vs baseball.

Cricket, for the uninitiated, is a sport that is as much a part of Australian culture as baseball is to the U.S. The only thing the 2 sports have in common is a bat and ball, and even they are both different. I won’t explain the rules here, instead I’ll direct you to the famous tea towel that came out in the 80’s that explained the game in 2 paragaphs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_towel_explanation_of_cricket

For many viewers of the video, this would be the second time they’ve seen a cricket bat. The first time would have been watching the brilliant movie Shaun of the Dead.

2. What sort of results did you get ?

The results were astonishing. After just 2 days the video had been viewed over 446,000 times, had 919 comments, been favorited 572, and held the number 1 spot in Australia for both Sports and generally, for both views and top ratings. It was also the number 3 most viewed globally in Sport. After a week it had gotten up to over 600,000 views.

As I write this, the video has had over 728,000 views, 1057 comments, been favorited 686 times, and for the month holds the number 1 spot in Australia for ‘Most Discussed - Sport’, ‘Most Viewed’ and ‘Most Viewed - Sport’, ‘Top Favorites - Sport’, and it’s the number 1 top rated in Sport this month too.

Not bad for a video that took all of 20 minutes to have on You Tube.

3. One of the keys to the success of the video, was due to the tags you used to define the video.. Firstly, what are tags and how do you use then correctly?

Tags are essentially labels you put on your videos. The beauty of tags of that you get to use more than one. Tags only work for you if you use words that are relevant to what your video is about. When someone does a search on You Tube (or any search) they use keywords that are the most obvious to what they’re looking for. Whichever videos have those keywords as their tags show up in the search results. Of course this applies to everything you can put tags on, like blogs, not just videos.

My video wasn’t the only one on You Tube of this great moment in sport. In fact there were heaps of them, and quite a lot of the videos uploaded were exactly the same clip (lots of copies got made). The reason my video won out over these other guys was simple, good tags.

Thinking like the average You Tube user, I made some educated guesses about what people would type in when they were searching. Using slang terms or descriptive language doesn’t work. I reasoned that people would search by the cricketers name, his nickname, the sport name, even the stadium the event took place, and of course the crucial word streaker.

4. With web 2.0 being such a buzz word, no matter what anyone does online these days it seems to fall under the web 2.0 banner… so to appeaze the Ed Dal’s of the world.. What super-awesome Web 2.0 techniques did you use ?

Here’s the cool part, I didn’t use any of them (except Twitter about it). I did this as a test based on my impressions of how high the level of interest would be. I have a Traffic Geyser account, and I also use Tube Mogul and Social Marker and a few others, but I decided early on to keep this pure vanilla. You Tube is still king of the hill when it comes to online video, and this was a test to see what kind of reach I could get just using it and nothing else. If I’d decided to go the ninja route and really put it out there, yes obviously it would have had a much greater reach.

The whole thing was a test of myself really, to see if my intuition was right, and to measure the quality of the timing. By having the video up that night, it was already being viewed and was ready for the following morning. I knew that the tipping point on this was the start of the work day across Australia the next day, as people either heard about it on the news, got told about it at work, or were looking for the clip to email to their friends.

Buzz words aside, using web 2.0 techniques are obviously what should be the norm. Don’t go out and do a vanilla test like I did. Most of it’s free too, which is very cool. For anyone new to it all wanting to make a start for free, I’d suggest 2 services. Tube Mogul, to get your videos out to over a dozen video sites, and Social Marker, to get your content bookmarked in as many places as possible. It’s time consuming setting all the accounts initially, but once it’s done it saves you so much time it’s rediculous.

5. How can someone apply these lessons to a non-smutty video like your nuddie man run?

What not having used fancy web 2.0 techniques does, is demonstrate how crucial the timing and awareness is. If your niche has something big happen on the news or within its own sphere of influence, you need to be ready. That’s where your news readers come in, that’s where being on the right email lists comes in, and that’s where having your reticular activation system finely tuned to your niche comes in.

The reticular activation system is a favourite of Ed Dale’s and for good reason. It’s that part of your brain that allows you to sort all of the information you have coming in from all of your senses, and tells you what you should pay attention to, and what you should ignore. We’ve all seen in action. The best example is of a car you’ve never really taken notice of before. Then someone shows you their new car, or you run into one or something, and then all of a sudden you see them everywhere. I never took notice of Suzuki Swifts, never. I’m now working with a guy who sells after market parts for them, and I’ve created the website, shopping cart and marketing materials. I literally now see them everywhere, and I mean everywhere. So much so, that my wife now sees them everywhere, and our game of Spotto we used to play with VW beetles is now a game for Suzuki Swifts.