That’s a great question, and one I get quite a bit.  We can go back and forth all day about “What Is” a viral video and “What Is Not”.  The reality is that defining a viral video is not rocket science.  We can test this threshold with a simple question.  Has the video been shared in a wide spread way?  And here is where the confusion resides.

Most people rate the viral video by how many views they video has obtained.  And while not totally without merit, the old argument, quality vs. quantity, floats to surface once again.  But lets put that aside for now and take a look at the pure facts.

Social media experts and digital strategist have many ways of marketing a video.  Some of them are expensive and some are labor intensive.  However, that being said, marketing does not = viral.  If I had enough computers and the demographic I was marketing to had a large enough audience I could easily promote a video and get 100′s of thousands of views.  But what does that mean?

Nothing!?!

“Viral” in this sense kind of means “a life of its own” and the answer to your question Stan is self answering once you understand this element.  What  video marketing experts are really good at is putting the fuel in the gas tank so to speak.  We can use video marketing, social media and a myriad of other channels to “push your ship out to sea” if you will, but from there the message and the content have to motor your ship.

The confusion I get most from marketing managers and DOM’s alike is that they think they’ve come up with a really, totally, fantastic, awesome, unbelievable idea that is sure to go viral.  And all they have to do is to make the video, put it on YouTube and… Voila!  99% of the time that is just not how it works.  You have to get your message/video out there.  You have to give it enough of a “push” to get it started.  Think of a viral video as a self propelled lawn mower.  Until you pull the cord, no grass is getting cut.  With viral videos, until someone pulls that “cord” no views are coming and your message never gets out.

Now once you’ve got your motor started what your hoping is that the mower will keep going as you sit back and drink your margarita in the lawn chair.  And this is another point of confusion.  In video marketing often the ROI is so inexpensive and the ancillary benefits so big, think SEO, that continued video marketing is well worth the effort if the viral effect your seeking isn’t happening.

The point is Stan, that sometimes a great online marketing team can HELP a video go viral but they can never promise or guarantee that it will.  What they can promise, with a good amount of certainty, is that they can get a substantial amount of views and hopefully start your engine.

Facebook like any good platform and much like Google is constantly changing the game. Some changes are to keep us social media consultants on our feet and others are to improve the platform. Edgerank is a Facebook algorithm that was designed, among other things, to keep people from gaming the system. The problem is that it also makes it hard to accomplish some key tasks to increase your community on Facebook.

The thing about EdgeRank is that it determines how many of your fans see your updates… and how often.  Taking its cues from Google again Facebook wants to serve you, its client, the most relevant content it can.  EdgeRank is an algorithm designed to sniff out what content is important to you.  The problem is that business pages (fan pages) rely on those fans and want to grow their base.  So EdgeRank makes it hard when you consider the fact your updates are not getting to all of your base.

So what you need to know is how EdgeRank determines who see’s your updates.  Lets take a look see:

Affinity

Exactly as it sounds this metric for EdgeRank determines a particular users “Affinity” for your content.  It is determined by the amount of engagement that particular user has had with your pages.  How often they’ve interacted with your updates using comments, likes and shares.  One thing to keep in mind is this does not work in the reverse.  No matter how often you as a “Page” interact with a user it will have no effect on “Affinity”.  That was smart, can you imagine the spam?

Weight

Facebook see’s everything you publish as and individual event.  Each event has a certain weight and each comment, like and share adds additional weight to that event.  The more weight an event has the more feeds it appears in.  This in turns increases the chance of more comments, likes and shares.  it becomes a Viral cycle.

Time/Expiration

Post have a certain life.  No matter how popular or “Weighted” eventually all post go to the grave yard.  The consensus is that the expiration is about 4 hours after the original posting event.  Once 4 hours have past your post (event) has reached the maximum number of feeds that is going to reach.  So within that 4 hour time frame you can do a lot of work to get your post to show in feeds but after that, its over.

How you Can Beat the System? Increase your EdgeRank! Go Viral

Engage your audience.  If your not getting engagement your not getting seen either.  Here is how.

Videos and Photos – It’s still amazing to me how hard it is for people/businesses to understand.  Rich media is always, always, always more engaging than text.   Use a video or a picture to engage your audience.  It’s simple, its engaging and it works.  Couple rich media with a great question or a contests and your well on your way to social media gold.

Encourage Engagement – Ask a question of your fans.  Don’t just make a statement actually ask for their participation.  But ask for simple answers like “in 3 words” or ” in 1 adjective”.  These are easy short responses that allow your audience not only to interact but to read what others have said quickly.

Seed Your Content – I know this seems like a bit of a trick but it really is a great way to get comments, likes and shares.   You can do this by sending some private messages to your best fans or some companies actually have employees engage with the content.  Not only is the perfectly acceptable but it should be encouraged.  And it has great effects in a viral sense.

Post Regularly – But don’t go overboard.  Posting more than every 4 hours can actually do damage.  It’s kind of like having link companies put thousands of links a day out there for you to increase visibility in the SERP’s.  But you do need to post frequently.

Use the Tools provided by Facebook to analyze you own page.  A few months ago Facebook put out an update for business pages called “talking about this”.  This tool tells you how many people are engaging with your content.

Talking about this Tool.

This tool actually lets you take a look at what is working and what isn’t.  Look for patterns in the data.  What type of posts are working? What time of day seems to be most effective and gets most engagement? Take a look at the chart that “talking about this” provides.

Viral Reach

Using this tool you can tell what has had the most effect on your fans by day.  So you can really get a sense of what was working. If you want to define the hours that are most effective simply make post at different times of day and then measure the effect base on the reaction.  If you don’t have any times to go on that you can derive from your data then go with the Facebook Standard.  Early Morning, generally 7-9am, end of work around 5pm and late at night 11pm to 1am.

At the end of the day, just like SEO staying up to date with the changes on Facebook is simply by staying engaging.  While the algorithms may change, while the tactics may change, Facebook is never ever going to penalize natural engagement.  So stay natural and engage.  It takes effort, there is not simple answer but it’s not brain surgery.  It’s simply ditch digging.

As if the news for traditional advertising wasn’t bad enough, strategic media consultancy MAGNAGLOBAL just dropped the other shoe.  Looks like the trend (spiral death funnel) will continue in 2012 and well into the foreseeable future.  If this was Monty Python the tune would be “Bring out your print, print is dead” only the the old man on top of the rolling death bed wouldn’t be saying  “I’m feeling much better.”  Take a look at the predicted reality.

News ain't good for print, or the agencies hanging around for the funeral

So lets all have a bit of fun and kick dirt in the face of Mr. Print by announcing that online advertising is predicted to grow a full 11% and claim 20% of the universes advertising dollars, drop kicking print into 3rd place behind online advertising which is second fiddle only to Television in the “Biggest global media category.”  Now if you wondering what the “big dawg” is with regard to online advertising you don’t have to look any further than video marketing.  Projected to grow a massive, mind blowing 43% in 2012 ,according to eMarketer, video marketing looks to be the new powerhouse.

The other notable fact the chart above keys in on is the loss of market in the Email world.  A -33% to the bottom line hurts.  Which is not to say that Email marketing is anywhere close to dead but trend setters will be looking for new Cinderella’s, as Email marketing’s proverbial “foot” seems to be getting a bit fat for the pretty little slipper.

So what will key players in the online world be focusing on?  Well, video of course.  Lets take a quick look.

Inside the Video Marketing World:

• Engagement – Hitting at the time the customer is looking to get the information is key to engagement.  Look for marketers to focus on key niche’s as demo’s get better defined in the online world.
• ROI -  One of online videos key attributes is the remarkable stats and possible ROI.  Unlike television, online video knows your not in the kitchen fix’n a sandwich and more importantly online video knows your interested in an ad because the action can happen now, not tomorrow.
• Share and Share alike – Hello? When’s the last time you called your friend to talk about the awesome commercial you saw during a recent rerun of Gilmore Girls?  (aa-hem) I mean Texas Rangers Baseball?  You haven’t.  But sharing a video is as easy as…well… apple pie.  Look for 2012 to be the time online marketers really amp up both the budget of online video and the marketing effort behind making them go viral.  Yes, marketing is the key to viral video.

Outside influences on Video Marketing:

• Near Field Communications – Near Field Communications is slated to make a big impact in 2012 and 2013 and you can bet the savvy marketing agency is going to be using video pumped to your mobile device to make you laugh unexpectedly.  Near Field Communications and video go together like Apps and iPads.
• Branding/No Push Mobile – Social media marketers are starting to get it.  No one is interested in your newest, latest, greatest widget.  Unless of course you made them laugh without telling them about your new widget.  Video will see tremendous growth on Mobile this year just as it will at in online marketing.  However there will be a much larger focus on cool/hip branding with not so obvious branding running in the background somewhere as opposed to push.  FINALLY, marketers are getting it.  Funny unbranded =  Viral (more often).
• Widespread Adoption of CPV – Cost Per View is becoming widely adopted in the industry.  CPV has been largely driven by the market as agencies doing the media buys find it a more simply method to engage target audiences vs. CPM.
• Dedicated Social Video Budgets – Up to 2012 for the most part social video budgets were included in traditional advertising budgets like pre-roll and displayed advertising.  Now social video is “All Grow’d Up” and got a budget of it’s own.
• The Earned Media Director – The big boys are getting serious about ROI and the internet.  The large Ad Agencies are starting to hire this new position to better understand the power of social media.  And you better believe that video is going to get resounding raves!
• Website Video Integration – With the remarkable explosion and success of Youtube monetization, Twitter promoted tweets, and Facebook sponsored stories, consumer experience will start to merge with brand video content and social video advertising.
• TV spots and Online Ad’s Divorce – Currently the trend is to test video on TV and then continue the success online expanding the brand campaign.  This year marketers are looking to claim their own territory leaving their TV brethren to fend for themselves.

2012 looks to be a promising year for the online advertising industry and as sure as Dorthy got back to Kansas traditional marketers and advertisers are going to be placing their bets with online video.  As the industry leaders have taught us that successful online marketing is at the intersection of video and consumer conversation, 2012 well may be the year that brought social video into the golden age.

Hang on its going to be a great ride! And I for one am looking forward to it!

So lets take a look at a typical search that might take place right here in Dallas.  The search term pizza Dallas returns the following results.

This is a typical mixed organic search result that most people will see when they do a similar search.  Now lets take a look at the eye-tracking data from a similar search.

Local Search Eye-Tracking Data and how your Social Media can help

This eye tracking data done by Google reveals why local search is becoming more prevalent in SERP’s.  Google can see that it’s what people are looking for when they do these searches. So don’t expect this to go away in the near future.

So then the question business owners are asking themselves is “if local searches are becoming more powerful how do I show up in those searches.”  And it’s a great question.  So lets take a look at how local search works.

Local Search

First and foremost to be involved with local search you must have a Google Places page to be ranked at all.  This is a very critical step and needs to be done correctly.  It’s not just enough to go put you business address and name into the places detail and be done.  Make sure you optimize your Places page.  And optimization means populating everything within your page with information.  It also means putting in rich media like pictures and video.  And make sure to optimize with the correct categories.  Think of it this way.  Google places is like having an your own ‘internal’ website within the monster that is Google.  So the first step is to optimize your Google Places site.

Once that step has been completed your next step is a different kind of optimization.  It’s different because typically we would now go out and get relevant links for our business site.  With local search the step is similar but what your looking for is citations.  Citations are to local search what links are to organic search.  Citations come from having your business listed in as many places as is possible.  So where do you go to get your citations?

Collecting Citations

Citations can be collected in numerous ways but lets start with the most powerful and obvious.  Those would be aggregators, Social Media sites, and local industry directories.  Beyond that you can look at newspapers, local websites and local blogs and there are others as well.  But lets concentrate on the big 3.

Aggregators

Aggregators are those sites that hold business information and offer specific infomration to help people choose businesses or services.  In addition to helping your get citations, listing your business with aggregators will also help your organic SEO as well, so you’re getting a two-fer.  And remember consistency with your Google Places page is key.  Make sure your fill profiles out the same “EXACT” way you filled them out for Places.  Here is a list of sites to start off with:

• Yelp
• City Search
• Superpages and Yellowpages
• Urban Spoon
• Angie’s List
• Yahoo Local
• Insider Pages
• Judy’s Book
• Yellow Bot
• Kudzo
• City Search

For specific searches you’ll also want to be in the following areas:

• Trip Advisor
• Merchant Circle
• Urban Spoon

These are just a few.  There may be aggregators that are more relevant to your business.  For instance if you have a beauty salon then,  “Find a Beauty Salon” would be a good place to start.  Beyond this list if your looking for other aggregators to suit your needs you can simply go to Google, search your city and business type.  A list of aggregators will certainly pop up.

Another helpful hint is to search your competitors.  See where they are listed and follow those leads as well.  You can get a look at a list like that by going into a search engine and searching for your competitors “name” and “phone number”.  Make sure you go pages deep into the search to get as many as you can.

Social Media

It’s no mystery that social media sites have gained a huge power with regards to search.  And it is no different for citations.  A good social media plan or digital strategy should have already demanded that your business go out and grab as many social media properties in your company name as you can, where relevant.   If not, do so right away. You can do that by starting out at www.namechk.com.

Once you have grabbed all those properties make sure to fill them out as completely as possible.  Make sure that they are exactly as you have your listing on Google Places.  Do not vary what you do.  This needs to be exact!

Local Industry Directories

Just like your competitors put your “city” and “Business” type in a search engine and it should return several local directories to populate.  most will be free some will be pay.  I would recommend for those just starting out that you don’t pay to be a part of a directory.  There is simply to much to do and to many free services to worry about signing up for pay sites before you need to.  Once you get your free directories optimized to a high efficiency then take a look at what your competitors may be paying for and get into those.  Again consistency with your Google Places page is paramount.

It’s a Big Job

There are quite literally hundreds of thousands of directories you could put yourself in.  But the key is to stay local.  Google gives more relevance for those who stay local.  Just like they would give you more “juice” from a link coming from a high authority site rather than a low authority site. So stay local.

Say consistent.  This is a huge key.  Make the most of your work by staying consistent with all of your efforts.  If you listed your business on “Smith Ave.” on one listing but make it “Smith Avenue” on another listing your work may be for not.  Stay consistant

Don’t get discouraged.  This isn’t a quick process.  It will not only take you a long time to do this correctly it will take a long time for Google to catch up to the listings.  Google’s web crawlers can’t be everywhere at once.  It may take a while to find the listing and give you citation credit.  That could be weeks or months, just keep at it.

TIPS

• Keep a master sheet with all your login information
• Keep your master business name address and other info on a spread sheet to remain consistent
• Write both Long and Short descriptions of your business for use in different places.  Use those descriptions religiously
• Get Google Auto Fill for your toolbar if possible
• Know where to login to add your info.  This is not always easy and finding the place to add your listing can be defeating.  Check out tips on line if your having trouble
• Double check your info at each site.  After submitting logout and back in and check your info.  Do this immediately a lot of these sites share info so if you wait your bad information may already be spread.
• Put rich media (pictures and video) wherever possible.  Keep and easy to get to folder on your desktop so you can access them quickly and easily

Tools

• Whitespark has developed a local citation finder.  I’ve not used it long so I can’t comment on it’s efficiency but my early test look promising
• Universal Business Listing offers a service for $30 that puts your business in many listings.  Don’t use this and nothing else.  But this is a nice step

I’m a huge Christmas Freak. As I like to say, I go full Griswold. One of my favorite and most time consuming tasks for the Christmas season is to see if I can put nuclear reactors on reserve power by lighting my house so it can be seen from Pluto. What I’ve learned over the last 10 years is that the task of putting the lights away is as important as the task of lighting my house. Why? Because well packed lights can save days on my next deployment. And just like your Social Media strategy, the packing of the lights requires a solid goal and a great plan.

As a lighting fanatic I’m always on the prowl for great new ideas and last year I came across a lifehack story about a great way to store Christmas Lights. Coffee Cans!  Just wrap the lights around coffee cans.  Could it be so simple?

Initially this seemed like a great, inexpensive (in lighting your always trying to save money) plan. Then I got to thinking. Well I can probably drum up two or three old coffee cans. The problem is I probably have about a gazillion strings of light, so unless I planned on spending my life savings on a bunch of coffee, this idea wasn’t practical (although probably good for my productivity).  So I asked myself, could I drum up enough coffee cans for this task if I engaged my social network? That would be an inexpensive way to accomplish the task. I concluded I probably could find enough cans to solve the problem.

So I happily began the task of hitting the social networks and asking every person in the known universe for their old coffee containers ( I never knew that old coffee cans where in such demand.  Does the coffee industry know this?  I’m thinking new market opportunity).  I quickly realized this task might be time consuming, but probably worth the effort.

Excited about my plan I gathered a few old coffee cans (hardware holders and bug catchers) and decided to give the idea a try to experience the genius.  I quickly realized that the cans were slippery, not easy to turn and a bit awkward to deal with.  And then I began to look at the coffee can and did some mental gymnastics trying to figure out how many would fit in a single container.  How many would fit in a container wrapped with lights?  How many lights could be wrapped on to a single coffee can?  WAIT A MINUTE! This idea wasn’t going to work.

I frantically hit the social networks and relieved my network of the impending stress I caused prematurely.

The problem? The problem was that I was trying to take an idea and make it a solution instead of letting the solution form the idea. What I should have been doing is going back to my originally devised plan and seeing how I could make it better.

My main goal for lighting storage was to make sure that the lighting could be easily stored, tested and put up on the house. That goal included avoiding tangles and huge piles of lighting wire that took days to sort out.  Note: My second year took me 4 weekends to put up the lights. Also, the storage space was limited. I had 4 huge plastic containers that would fit all my lights that barely fit the available space in my garage so space was a major concern. The original plan was to carefully wrap my wire using the “hand to elbow” method and lay the wire flat in the container all while trying to keep certain sections of the house in certain containers. And while this plan had some modest success is was far from great.

But the Lifehack article gave me a great idea. So I went back and looked at my plan and asked myself how I could address my goals more efficiently.  The idea of the coffee can took care of a huge problem regarding tangles and breakage.  But the coffee can’s would take up too much space and hurt my storage capabilities.  How about 2×4′s. A 2×4 wasted much less space than a coffee can. A 2×4 could be easily labeled and a 2×4 could be cut to custom lengths for different sections of lights. The 2×4 was the perfect solution for my holiday lighting storage.  Did it address all my goals?

Goals:

• No Tangles -  Check (improvement)
• Easily Removed – Check (improvement)
• Easily Tested -  Check (Vastly improved, and I can now test large strings instead of individual strings)
• Sorted  – Check (Vastly improved, not only can I sort by container I can sort by 2×4. I can also label – no guessing)
• Storage – Check  ( I could store in the same set of containers – drawback extra weight)

Going back and addressing my original goals helped me ask the correct questions to find the perfect plan.  This years lights went up without a hitch. The system was flawless. And it was flawless because I went back to my goals and adjusted the plan.  The new plan more successfully addressed my goal then did the previous plan.

Just like your social media solution should start with a goal that develops a perfect plan… a strategy.

In my career I’ve run into WAY too many clients that had vendors that loved to deploy “tactics”, things they’ve read as tips and tricks in social media, that had absolutely zero value for the client. To sum it up. Those agencies were trying to apply a coffee can solution to a social media problem that required a 2×4.

We are in a phase of social media where many clients, executives and companies are now seeing a need to be involved in this vast social media landscape. But we also happen to be in a phase of social media where there are a very large number of agencies, vendors and experts that have no practical experience and are trying to apply social media solutions to companies problems via the ‘tips and tricks’ blogs they’ve read somewhere in the blogosphere.

Social media is a real tool that can provide companies with numerous new channels for customer acquisition, lead generation and branding. But the solutions that exist are as varied and numerous as the clients that use them. When seeking a vendor, agency or expert make sure your not going to get a coffee can solution for a 2×4 problem.  When you hire your digital expert make sure he/she knows the “Zen of Christmas Light Packing an Storage.” Otherwise your house might not get lit next year.

Correct strategy starts by understanding your business.  By understanding these 5 main questions.

1 – What is your company all about in one sentence?

2 – Who are you trying to reach?

3 – What are you trying to say?

4 – Why are you trying to say it?

5 – What do you want your target to remember or leave with?

These are the main questions you need to be able to answer but depending on your campaign a good expert or agency will go much more in depth about your company.  Non-experts and inexperienced agencies will skip these steps and avoid questions that cause confusion because this reduces the chance of loosing the sale.   Social media carries a different name then we are used to when we are considering “advertising” but make no mistake, when it’s done for your company, it’s adverting.

And though the new rules of this new medium require different types of strategies to accomplish a similar task.  The method of discovery has not much changed.  To skip the process of discovery only dooms your attempts to accomplish the end goal.

Take a look at these 5 companies via this awesome info graphic and see how the best of the best are doing it.  And remember, flexibility is they key to success of any campaign you may try to execute but that doesn’t mean that planning shouldn’t be the most important step.

Companies doing "The Social Media" Right

More

Consumers say “if  you’re engaging, entertaining and provide value, I’ll listen to, ‘Like’, and use your brand”.

The Savvy Corp. says “how about video, games and Apps?”

Apps were the new social media last year.  As corporations finally realized that the social market could bear the promised fruit, if only certain rules were followed, Apps became the standard way to achieve that long lost positive ROI that had been promised all this time.

And as is standard fare for tech.  As soon as you blink, things are already changing.

Enter the social media, near field communications.  Still in its infancy near field communications has amazing promise and what gives it more hope is that Google or more specifically Google Wallet is powering the innovation.  Initially developed as a quick way to check  out of a store via your mobile device.  Now, instead of whipping out your piece of consumer plastic, simply swipe your phone and… viola, your product is paid for.  And while this seems and obvious evolution, the technology surrounding security has not been so obvious.

Now on the verge of launch, coming 2012, the new applications driven by this tech are amazing.  And whats more amazing is that corporations are lining up to use this new technology just as poorly as they approached social media a few years ago.  As predictable as they are the corporations will once again use NFC to “Push” their messages.  This of course will delay the use of the new applications as they become more available, as consumers don’t derive value from them, as the corporations aren’t providing any.  I’m sorry but learning that your new mobile phone is 20G is not important to me.

Imagine being able to get served a video after swiping your phone or getting a great new video served to your phone as you walk by a concert poster.  Again, Predictability, advertisers, corporations and the media will want to serve you messages about how awesome their new fancy product is.

Instead imagine a savvy corporation wanting to serve its savvy client a ridiculously funny video after they just used your MasterCard or a band giving you their latest kick-ass video free for download with a link for 20% discount on concert tickets in your town.  Imagine hidden engagement, entertainment and value hidden everywhere in our environment.  Every machine you walk by, every pair of jeans  you find in a store, imagine those “Easter Eggs” everywhere in your environment.  Imagine your environment, your real environment becoming completely interactive with your online world.  Well that’s the new “social media” I want.

Apple’s new, proposed, hydrogen fuel cell technology will not only give apple a leg up on the “cool”  factor of its devices but also on the quality.  What this means to the competition like the RIMM Playbook and the Amazon Kindle in the tablet market, and Google, HTC and Samsung in the mobile market, will take a while to discover but one can only marvel at the possible implications.

What happens when Apples new iphone 6 goes 2 or 3 weeks on a charge vs HTC’s 2 days?  How many new Kindles will be bought at 25% of the iPad’s cost when the iPad can go on 1 charge for a month.  Does the price differential support the market share or does it erode?  All these questions will be answered soon enough for sure but 1 thing is a guarantee.  There are some behemoth companies that read the Apple news last week and filled some boots with warm yellow liquid.