Facebook Lexicon Mines Facebook Talk

Facebook released a new tool today called Facebook Lexicon that allows anyone to trend words and phrases that have been written on walls of users, groups, or pages. The raw data isn’t shown, so its only valuable for trending and comparison of discussion. Some thoughts on use:
- is your viral campaign gaining attention
- is your product launch gaining attention
- what day of the week to users talk about…
- what time of day do users talk about…

This tool will be linked to in the Media Tools section of this website for future use.

Making Promotional Videos Viral on Youtube

This weekend a video was posted on YouTube that discusses the methods of making a video viral on YouTube. The strategies come from a viral video agency that has written a number of controversial articles about their success in-market. The video does really well to summarize the overall strategies:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0EQ5HYPz1w

On top of that, certain “jump-points” were listed as how they get the initial viewers that will lead to the viral explosion:

Blogs: We reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and actually pay them to post our embedded videos. Sounds a little bit like cheating/PayPerPost, but it’s effective and it’s not against any rules.

Forums: We start new threads and embed our videos. Sometimes, this means kickstarting the conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different users. Yes, it’s tedious and time-consuming, but if we get enough people working on it, it can have a tremendous effect.

MySpace: Plenty of users allow you to embed YouTube videos right in the comments section of their MySpace pages. We take advantage of this.

Facebook: Share, share, share. We’ve taken Dave McClure’s advice and built a sizeable presence on Facebook, so sharing a video with our entire friends list can have a real impact. Other ideas include creating an event that announces the video launch and inviting friends, writing a note and tagging friends, or posting the video on Facebook Video with a link back to the original YouTube video.

Email lists: Send the video to an email list. Depending on the size of the list (and the recipients’ willingness to receive links to YouTube videos), this can be a very effective strategy.

Friends: Make sure everyone we know watches the video and try to get them to email it out to their friends, or at least share it on Facebook.

[bullets supplied by TechCrunch article found here]