Here are the  5 Genres of Viral Video:

1. Pop-culture
2. Shock & Awe
3. Sexy, Sexy
4. Cute!
5. Song & Dance

Check out the Salutes below and see if we’re right.

Monday 6/21

World Cup vuvuzelas are hot. Lord of the Rings is always hot. Those ingredients make viral video success.

Tuesday 6/22

Branded viral video formula = sexy bikinis + amusing rap song. It’s that easy!

Wednesday 6/23

Shakira is super cheesy in this Waka Waka music video. The whole friggin video is cheesy. But its still the #1 viral video in the world right now: music videos are still popular

Thursday 6/24

Babies may have nothing to do with bottled water, but Evian knows a viral video won’t hurt their sales

Friday 6/25

Our favorite new extreme sport is Liquid Mountaneering. Unbelievably badass.

This week’s Video Salutes have serious potential to be great video ads, not just great videos. Each Video Salute here could sell a specific product and fit the brand’s voice and value proposition. Just open your eyes a little wider and you’ll realize the work is half done. Video Army views all videos as potential marketing weapons. Do you?

Monday 6/14

Aquariums should use internet videos like this for marketing. Simply beautiful.

Tuesday 6/15

This popular baby could be selling Pampers or Gerber. Instead he’s just selling loads of cuteness.

Wednesday 6/16

In case you missed it, here’s a recap of last week’s England vs. USA game – LEGO style

Thursday 6/17

Finally, Facebook is doing video marketing. Or at least video public relations.

Friday 6/18

Sweet 50 year old man lifting a refrigerator into his truck. Chevy better hop on this concept for marketing.

If you are an avid YouTube user, then you are familiar with their analytics feature, YouTube Insights. This tool allows you to see how many people have viewed your videos, what part of the world they are in, where your views are coming from and more. But, did you know that you can also look at the statistics on videos that aren’t yours?

Viewing a YouTube Video’s Statistics

NOTE: The user who uploaded the video has the option to disable these statistics so all of them may not be available on all videos.

1. Go to the YouTube video page that you are looking for information about. Make sure that you are on the individual video page and not the Channel Page.
2. On the lower right hand side of the video you will see the total number of views with a double down arrow next to it. Click this arrow and the video’s statistics will expand.
3. The statistics will be separated into total views, total interactions, links to the video, audiences and honors.

Interpreting YouTube Video Statistics

• Total Views: This shows you the total number of views that a video has accumulated over it’s life span. Interesting to see the growth over time and key events that spiked the traffic.
• Comments, Favorites, Ratings: These numbers show how engaging a given video is. The higher the number of these interactions, the more engaging the video is for viewers.
• Links: This is the most interesting section in my opinion. Here you can see where the views came from. You can see where the video was embedded off of YouTube, sites linking to the video, terms that people searched for to find the video, if the video was referred by another YouTube video and more. This is the most useful tool for determining how a video became successful.
• Audiences: Shows you the Gender, Age and Geographic Location of the video viewers. Often times you will find that this information surprises you and the audience for a given video is not who you thought it was. As a business, this can help you identify your target market by looking at the viewers of your competitor’s videos.
• Honors: This shows which YouTube honors the video has received, if any. This includes things like most viewed, most discussed, and top rated in a given time period/category/country. Getting on these lists greatly increases a videos visibility and viral video potential.

Do you have any other tips or tricks for analyzing YouTube Statistics? Let us know in the comments!

Dogs + High Speed Camera = Awesomeness

Tuesday 6/8

Daft Punk and Snoop Dogg in the spaceport cantina. Addidas knows Star Wars makes a viral video.

Wednesday 6/9

We love bars, but not $73,000 bar tabs. Check out this creative ad campaign to raise drunk driving awareness

Thursday 6/10

Just try not to laugh. A seriously sweet viral from Skype

Friday 6/11

A great world cup ad in honor of opening day! USA vs England tomorrow.

U-S-A, U-S-A

To stay up to date with the latest events, be sure to become a fan of Video Army on Facebook.

If you were there, let us know what you thought in the comments! See you next time!

1234►

Today we salute all those serving in the Armed Forces. You’re the true soldiers. We just do video.

Tuesday 6/1

Extremely funny musical number. This is how you market an indie film.

Wednesday 6/2

Best Star Wars video we’ve seen in a long time. Who’s says Jedi chivalry is dead? We do.

Thursday 6/3

Beautiful, inspiring ad. Simple execution of a big idea. Everything works here.

Friday 6/4

Happy Friday everyone. We made it to the end, unlike these guys.

Guys Can’t Make It Up Down Escalator – Watch more Funny Videos

If your business is producing any type of content such as a blog, photos, podcast, or videos, Twitter can be a good channel for content syndication. If you’re curious about what people are saying about your industry, brand, or competitors, learning how to make use of Twitter Search is can be a very valuable monitoring tool.

Twitter Tip #4: Content Syndication

Do you have a blog? Do you regularly post videos to your YouTube channel? Does your product or service receive any type of digital press (e.g. blog reviews, executive interviews, etc.)? In combination with regular interactive and engaging conversation with your followers or other industry professionals, Twitter is a great way to get the word out about the lastest news and press about your brand. Most blog content management software (like Wordpress or Blogspot) has built in Twitter notifications that will tweet a link to your latest post automatically after you’ve posted it. However, be careful that you don’t overwhelm your followers only with content/link updates and be sure to include context (using Hashtags and relevant keywords) to the tweet in addition to or instead of the title. This will help with exposure and search optimization.

Twitter Tip #5: Brand/Competitor Monitoring

Don’t want to use Twitter as a communication tool or want to observe what others (i.e. your competitors) are doing first? Perfect. Twitter can be a very powerful brand monitoring tool that you can use even if you’re not sending updates yourself.Twitter has a search feature that allows you to search for whatever terms or keywords you’d like through all of the public tweets that have been sent in the last two weeks or so. How does this help you? See what others are saying about your brand. Is it positive? Negative? What about your industry in general? Are people asking questions that you can answer on behalf of your business?

Monitoring conversation is like free market research (in social media it’s usually referred to as measuring “sentiment”). You listen, observe, and learn. Maybe it will inspire you to join ongoing conversations and reach out to people. Maybe it will provide your business with insight that you can use going forward (like how you can do a better job than your rival competition). If you were a restaurant and everyone was tweeting about how bad your food was, would you want to know? Or maybe a customer had an issue with your service and instead of bringing it to your attention directly, they tweeted about it. How customer service oriented will you look when you respond to their Twitter complaints? But you’d never see any of that unless you’re monitoring the conversation.

Twitter Search in Plain English

This concludes our “Twitter Tips for Business” blog series. If you have further questions on how to use Twitter for your business, please feel free to leave your comments below or Contact Us directly.

Tuesday May 25
Best war movie scene ever? We think so.

Wednesday May 26
Childline uses branded entertainment to sell their service. Score another one for Video Marketing.

Thursday May 27
Thanks for keeping our city safe Kung-Fu bear. Video Army salutes you.

Friday May 28
Have a classy weekend everybody.

Twitter Tip #2: Social Contests

Want to amp up your follower growth? Social contests can be a really effective way to garner engaged followers and can also be a lot of fun to run. There are numerous ways to implement contests on Twitter, but you need to make sure that you spend enough time prior to the event promoting the contest date, time, and other relevant info people need to know, especially if your follower count is relatively small. People are always up for winning free stuff or discounts on services or products they already use, but they have to know the opportunity is out there in order to participate.

You can also try reaching out to followers who interact with you often to see if they’ll help you spread the word. Another tactic is to reach out to other brands on Twitter and see if they’ll co-host the contest with you or provide some free stuff for the prize package. If the contest benefits their business as well as yours, you could have a possible long-term partnership in the making.

Twitter Social Contest: 2pm Backstage Passes

Twitter Tip #3: Exclusive Updates

A good way to keep your community growing and happy, is to make sure that they feel valuable. After all, your interactions with your community help you improve your business and maybe even increase sales, so why not give something back in return?

Exclusive updates, sale announcements, and behind-the-scenes content are all pieces that can take you very little time to produce but that gives your followers a reason to keep following. Think of some of your favorite brands and then ask yourself how cool it would be if they offered you special deals or behind-the-scenes info just for following them on Twitter (read The Golden Rule Effect of Social Media if you like that idea). Chances are your followers feel the same way. When you’re planning your content publication, promotions, or press release strategy make sure you’re including Twitter in the mix and now you have a exclusive updates.

Feel free to ask us specific questions you may have on Social Contests and Exclusive updates in the comments below. Our last installment of our three part series on Twitter Tips for Business is on Content Syndication and Brand Monitoring. We’ll be sharing ideas on how you can use Twitter to increase blog readership, video views and also monitor the conversations surrounding your brand or your industry by using Twitter Search.

“Tweeting” on behalf of a business, product, service, or event  is more than just sending messages out there into the universe. Even if updates are being done regularly, without a goal in mind or knowledge of how to gain more followers and establish relationships with brand advocates, the time spent on Twitter is wasted. Granted, playing around with new tools and figuring out what works and what doesn’t is a great way to learn. If you have that kind of flexibility and time, take advantage of it! However, if that approach doesn’t come natural to you or you just don’t have the time (as many small business owners do not), we’re devoting our next three blog posts to simple Twitter tips for business.

Part One of our “Twitter Tips for Business” blog series is on Interaction, Outreach, and Imitation.

Twitter Tip #1: Interaction, Outreach, and Imitation

One of the more obvious ways to use Twitter is for audience interaction and outreach. However, this doesn’t mean merely Tweeting every day and responding to people you follow. As a business, your outreach goal should be twofold: community growth and quality followers. So while increasing your follower count is a valid goal for a business, having 2,500 followers who only follow you to increase their own follower count isn’t going to help you. In the short-term, the numbers might look impressive but you’re not going to get anything out of those types of followers.

What you really should be striving for is meaningful interaction that helps build the reputation of your business and also provides feedback for you in how to improve upon your service or product.

So how do you build quality followers? By being authentic and engaging. Don’t just send Tweets every day and hope that people will respond. Get out there and make connections with the people or business that matter to you by mentioning (@mentioning) them in your updates and re-tweeting (“RTing”) their updates that would be relevant for your followers (or that are just interesting to you).

A great resource for getting started is the WeFollow.com Twitter directory. In some ways it’s like a huge Twitter yellow pages that categorizes the most popular Twitter accounts by subject or profession. Find some of the leaders in your industry and start following their updates. That will provide you with more fuel for your Twitter updates and will also give you the opportunity to see how the “pros” are using Twitter. Maybe you’ll learn a thing or two by seeing how they do it and then turn around and use similar tactics for your own business. After all, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!

Twitter in Plain English

Do you use Twitter for your business? How did you get started? What has been the most important thing you’ve learned so far in regards to Interaction, Outreach, or Imitation? Share your stories and tips with us in the comments below.