If you want a good tutorial and an in progress case study on creating viral web videos, than check out today’s New York Times’ article on political YouTube Ads. The article is about Ladd Ehlinger’s work on creating successful (aka viral) YouTube political ads. It particularly follows Ehlinger’s creation of an ad for Republican candidate Sean Bielat of Massachusetts. After reading the article there were four take-aways I gained on how to have a video go viral. With the November elections around the corner we will have to see if having a viral YouTube video makes any difference in winning! ~Paul

1. Creating Buzz Around the Buzz
I think the major ingredient Ehlinger capitalizes on is the political hot-spots that are going on right now. It’s not necessary to completely create your own buzz. It seems the videos that do the best are those which focus on current interest (think Obama Girl in 2008).

I know the economy is struggling, but I was a bit surprised when I stumbled across a NPR story of an Idaho high school selling advertising on their test sheets. It has been over a year since this was reported and I am curious to know how successful this experiment of extreme personalized marketing panned out. Did it help bring in significant amount of funds, and did the advertising businesses feel that they where able to receive an ROI on their advertisements?

This is a unique case study and it makes me wonder how ethical it is to penetrate the academic veil. I know we have advertisements in the schools, like vending machines and other healthy alternatives =), but I wonder what damage we do when we start prostituting the actual learning environment. To me, having interruption advertising on the test teaches the kids that nothing is above the principle of making money.

If you are going to have advertising on the test, you might as well put advertising on the school toilet paper! You definitely would get more views, though you would be competing against the creative artwork and slogans found on the walls of the stalls.

A little while ago my friend, Reina, asked about my thoughts concerning the recent change in the FTC advertising guidelines. I have a strong opinion on why I feel the FTC is meddling with bloggers (and other web entities). Below is my answer to her question. It may come across a bit as conspiracy theory, but I don’t believe I am wrong (I guess conspiracy theorists usually believe they are right).

REINA: So today is slow at work so I was going back through all my emails at work and found an article about changes in FTC guides regarding web endorsements. I’m curious if you’ve heard about this, if so, what your thoughts are on it, and also how it has affected blogging and advertising. Have you noticed a difference? Is this sort of thing enforceable or will it be online business as usual? The article made me think of you. Just curious what your thoughts are. Here’s the article.

With all the brilliant ways to do web marketing I am amazed that banner ads are still alive. We see them every where, so someone still finds impression advertisement effective. For me the banner ad was born dead (or at least mostly dead ). Even back in the 90′s I never clicked on them, I felt they were invasive and annoying (as I assume that a lot of people do).

Yet, like spam, banner ads penetrate the masses with nothing more than sheer brute force and undodged determination. Whether it is with the old static skyscraper ads or the new interactive—play a game or punch President Bush—banners, you cannot but surf a few popular websites without being annoyed by them.

The other day I clicked on my first banner ad in over a decade. The ad copy stated: “Warning: Smoking Can Used To Kill You” (see actual ad below). I looked at the ad for a long time before clicking on it. First, I was trying to tell myself that I didn’t need to encourage businesses using intrusive advertising to get my attention. Second, I was trying to figure out what the ad’sangle was. Finally, my curiosity won and I succumbed to yet another marketing scheme and clicked on the banner.

I had the opportunity to meet Seth Godin when he came to Salt Lake in 2007—quite an amazing man. I own a lot of his books and see him as one of the great marketing thinkers and philosophers of all time.

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sad-child10-edited

Back in January my long time friend, Eric Proffitt, called me and said he had a crazy idea he wanted to share with me. First, though, before I share his idea I have to give a little background on Eric.

I’ve know Eric for 13 years and ever since I’ve known him he has sang like a well tuned canary. He has one of the most amazing voices. The last few years Eric has really pushed his talent to be the voice against human trafficking. He even sang and did a program for the United Nations last year, which highlighted the serious issue of modern-day slavery.

backlinks03jpg Have you ever wondered what the web would be if it was run by lawyers? Nah, me neither, but I received a tiny glimpse of what it might look like when a friend emailed me Advanstar’s Terms of Use for Linking. My friend wanted to be sure that her company was compliant to Advanstar’s Gestapo like terms.

At first, I thought my friend was kidding. Then I read Advanstar’s terms. My favorite is:

“Advanstar may at any time, in its sole discretion, without cause, revoke your right to link to any pages on this Site. In such event upon request, you agree to immediately remove all links to this Site”

See The Mother of All Lists.

Darren Rowse over at Problogger is doing another “31 Days to Build a Better Blog.” In his second lesson he encouraged those participating to create a list post and then to submit the list into the comments of his post.

By the time I submitted my own list there were hundreds of lists already submitted (553 to be exact). Being that I recently became a father in the last few days sleeping has become a luxury. This being the case, I decided to take advantage of my sleepless nights and compile all the lists that were in Darren’s comments.

yahoo-fail

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googlolopoloy (click on the links to see the top 100 google results)

My good friend over at The Flaming Monkey Nostrils Blog (you’ve got to love blog names these days) brought this to my attention about 20 minutes ago. He had me do a search for “google keyword tool” and google.com doesn’t show up. I always use the google keyword tool and usually type in “keyword tool,” since they always rank #1. However, when I did a search they did not show up.

I then tried google translate, google labs, google analytics, google maps, and google earth. Not one had the dot com show up. The dot uk or dot org might show up but never the dot com. The real kicker was when I did a search for just Google and only the dot org showed up in the top 100 results. I can only imagine that google’s own algorythm has penalized its very own domain. That’s a big fat FAIL on Google’s part!