Lesson #3: Viral Marketing Could Be Vital For Your Business

YouTube did not just grow to become the virtual monster that it is today simply because it made it easier for people to upload and watch videos, although it did that too. Instead, it was a carefully planned strategy on the parts of Hurley and Chen to engage in a campaign of viral marketing that helped take YouTube to the where it is today.

In the company’s early days, Hurley and Chen realized that they were just one among a myriad of other dot-coms trying to get noticed in the complex online world. And so, they knew they would have to do whatever they could to stand out.

The duo began to promote their new company by placing promotional advertisements on CraigsList.com, one of the most popular online networks of classifieds and user forums, divided by urban area. Hurley and Chen posted ads that requested aspiring female models in the Los Angeles area to upload their personal videos on YouTube. They believed this would be a win-win proposal; aspiring models would want to gain the attention from having people watch their videos, and conversely, people would actually want to watch videos of these women.

Hurley and Chen’s CraigsList strategy proved unsuccessful, and they were forced to come up with another means of promoting their site. After the company received funding from a venture capital firm, the two revamped both their site and their promotional tactics. They began giving away an iPod Nano each and every day for the next few months to people who uploaded videos. Unlike CraigsList, this promotion actually worked and helped YouTube turn around its tepid growth.

“Once traffic picked up, roughly every two weeks or so a video would become wildly popular,” said one YouTube employee. “Soon the time between these super-hit videos started shrinking. The site took off at a scorching pace.” Because of the rapid rate at which video content was distributed, YouTube became the number one go-to source for recent events. For instance, after the Southeast Asian tsunami, as well as Janet Jackson’s SuperBowl dressing malfunction, videos appeared on YouTube so quickly that the site experienced two of their largest traffic spikes ever.

YouTube’s viral growth was also a result of its ability to take advantage of the growing popularity of social networking. Because Hurley and Chen understood its importance to the online generation, they made it easy to embed and host YouTube videos on any webpage or blog. So, as the popularity of sites like MySpace took off, so inevitably did YouTube’s, since MySpace users were taking advantage of the ease of their online video technology. And, because of the embedded links back to YouTube that were contained in the videos, the company’s page rank on Google was rapidly increasing. Search traffic was thus being driven to YouTube in a seemingly natural way.

YouTube also tried to establish its own social networking community, by allowing such features as related video recommendations, video comments, and one-click emailing to recommend a video to a friend. It was by taking all of these steps that YouTube went from being just another dot-com to an Internet phenomenon almost overnight.



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