Video Link: Sweet Dee Promotes The Bar with Crazy Paddy – It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

One of my favorite shows on cable is It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. It’s about the on-going antics of four degenerate, self-centered losers who co-own and/or work at a bar in Philadelphia. Kind of a “Friends”-gone-horribly-wrong sitcom. I love watching it for two reasons.

The first is just that it’s one of those shows that is so, so funny for reasons that are so, so wrong in every way that I should almost be ashamed of myself for watching it.

The second is that one of the underlying themes is them attempting any shortcut they can to make more money from their bar. I like to think how I would have advised them in real life. Of course, they aren’t the kind of people who would listen to me.

The Problems with the “Viral Video Fallacy”

The problem in the video above is that both characters are trying to do all the wrong things in getting their video campaign started.

Right now I want to talk about how, in an earlier scene not pictured above, Sweet Dee has decided she’s going to “make a viral video”.

There are so many things wrong with both the phrase “make a viral video” and the fact that she intends to do so in order to promote a local business that I hardly even know where to start.

1- By definition, there’s no such thing as creating a viral video. We’ll get into the particular of that another time.

2- Making a viral video to promote a local business isn’t the best idea. It may work, but why not go after a method that’s 90% likely to fix the problem instead of the one that’s only 5% likely, all other things being equal?

3- She ends up attempting to make the cringe-worthy spectacle you see at the beginning of the video, one of those horrible, local cable commercials that make you want to turn your set off during sponsorship breaks.

How NOT to Approach Creating Video for Small Business

Which brings us to Charlie’s idea of how to fix the problem. His idea? If you want to make a video that’s successful in the way YouTube videos are successful, someone has to get hurt.

And yeah, in the video, this is so funny that every time I watch this episode again, I rewind this scene and watch the ball hit her in the face in slow motion. It cracks me up, and ironically is a clip that would make me want to watch “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” if I’d never seen it before.

Not because someone is getting hurt, but because I would just have to know what was going on there.

In real life, I don’t think people getting injured on film is funny. I understand WHY people think it’s funny, but I’m much more empathic than normal people are supposed to be and on some occasions will actually be in pain myself watching something like that take place. Unless of course I know it’s fake.

Regardless of that – laughing at pain doesn’t sell… anything. Not in and of itself.

Unless you’re a national brand with the kind of budget that can afford to put a commercial up that looks to sell by demographic, hoping to reach enough people that the odds will bear this wasteful model out, a video based purely on entertainment value isn’t going to do more than raise awareness and brand you.

And possibly to an audience that doesn’t want to, or simply can’t, buy your product or service.

Even if you are? Please don’t hurt anyone.

Seriously though, if you’re coming up on this week’s deadline in the video traffic challenge and want to submit in time to make sure your video gets listed, but can’t come up with a topic, here are some ideas.

5 Video Topic Ideas for Business Owners

1. Create a video version of your about page. This isn’t my idea. I saw it yesterday on Twitter and can’t find the post now.
2. Repurpose existing content: Take a blog post, article, or presentation and turn it into a video. You can do this with screencast video software or just talk to the camera.
3. Lisa Barone says “Show Your Product in Action” in an article on Small Biz Trends. There are 5 more tips in that article.
4. Shoestring Marketing says “Ask Customers or Clients to send in video” – two more tips there.
5. Do a short parody of a misled solution to a common customer problem. Xerox just did a great job with this in their recent commercial featuring Michelin. I thought it was funny even though I didn’t get it at first.

Have you got ideas for what kind of video to create that hasn’t been mentioned already? Do tell!

Resources:

List of Our Video Traffic Participants

The Original Video Traffic Challenge Thread

Network Solution’s Case Study on What It Takes to Make a Video Campaign both Viral and Successful

Fast Video Traffic Free Sample Chapter

Video Challenge Participants: Tomorrow is the deadline for the first video in the challenge. If you have your video up as a reply to the post announcing our Video Challenge Participants by tomorrow, I’ll help promote your video and the blog post where it’s published for an entire week starting tomorrow. If I pinged you on Twitter to alert you to this post, it’s most likely as a nudge to remind you.

If you left it for me elsewhere, please let me know where.

I’m told the smart thing to do is to

make one of those squeeze page thingees

and get more people on my list by making them sign up to my newsletter,

THEN make the landing page my Fast Facebook Traffic guide or the one about getting more leads, fans and customers from your Facebook page, before

finally giving away the video for free.

And sometimes I do that. I use my free content to generate leads. Anyone who thinks that’s wrong is welcome to provide for my family or keep walking.

Free is known to have a price – time investment, and email address… but that’s not what I’m doing today.

Because I also believe something is to be said for being more open and accessible with your information and giving out as much value as you can beforehand.

I’ll let you watch the video, then I’ll come back to why I’m giving this away at the bottom of the page.

If you can’t see the video below, because you’re reading this via feed or syndication, you can take a look at today’s newsletter about the Basic Facebook Strategy video.

Hope you enjoy this and find it useful.

So where were we? I was saying how great it is to give things you could charge for away, right?

It’s not to destroy the competition that creates products that aren’t as good as the free tips you give away. Not everyone puts a value on free unless they trust you. So that’s not it.

And there’s more benefit than just the good feeling it gives you. When you invest the hours and hours it takes to produce a 40 minute video, edit it so it makes sense to people, then make the format digestible to a web browser, and give it away completely free, you provide assistance to the world.

I believe that comes back to you, especially in the days when you’re absolutely aching for a break, or help or… some form of good luck to come your way after almost 6 weeks of not being able to work at full speed because you were sick or unable. That’s the spot I’m in today, and it always comes back to – give until it hurts.

But it’s not the spiritual reward that makes this a valid tip. It’s not the belief that I have that any good you put into the world will come back to you ten-fold.

Yeah, I hope you buy my products. I believe $8.88 is reasonable for techniques that over the past four years have put over $100k in my pocket

Now, that could be taken as me making a testimony to my own greatness. And I’m pretty arrogant about the things I’m good at, so that’s probably true.

Or it could be taken as an extra free traffic tip – giving away valuable information that others would charge for, because you believe it’s the right thing to do for that situation. Also true.

Because the real tip here is that when you put valuable information into the world, when you do a service that you are in no way obliged or even expected to do, you can’t go wrong.

Your reputation will improve, no matter how high it already is. The information you share speaks to your expert status and functions as a free trial.

And if nothing else, you helped someone. People don’t easily forget that.

Back to belief systems though – I am certain this small deed will come back to me. It may not come from where I’d like or hope, but somehow, it always returns, greatly multiplied.

Recently, Google announced the availability of Unlisted Videos on YouTube.

From the YouTube post:

Melinda teaches high school in the Bay Area and recently reached out to us with a problem. Her students just finished a video history project that she wanted to share with their parents and classmates. But she was concerned about posting the videos publicly because she didn’t want the whole world to find them (frankly, neither did her students). Melinda told us YouTube’s private sharing options — a 25-person cap that’s limited to other YouTube users — didn’t work for her. She needed a better option to privately share her students’ talent.

I can think of three things you can do with an unlisted YouTube video, and one reason why you should be cautious about having one. What could you do with an unlisted YouTube Video?

1. Make special content just for subscribers. (Eliminates the problem of “I can’t see the video. Everyone can see YouTube.)
2. Create easter eggs for your customers. (I believe that each channel of information to your customers should be unique in some way. And hidden benefits encourage people to pay closer attention.)
3. Share videos that you’d rather people link to than republish. (You can already do this by using the option to block embedding, but with an unlisted video, they have to come to you, and no one can happen upon it.)

So why be cautious? Well, the point of publishing on YouTube, rather than, say, Screencast.com, is for the video to get as much exposure as possible and even go viral, with the most number of people able to access and view it as possible. If that’s what you want, an unlisted video is not the way to go.

Do you know of any cool implementations of Unlisted YouTube videos? Do tell.

Quick video I did on UberVu vs Topsy.

I normally use Tweetmeme and BackType Connect to follow social media conversations about my site. But these were worth a mention, as I love anything that will link back to my blog when someone’s tweeted about me.

It’s less than five minutes so it’s not an in-depth comparison, but it’s enough to raise your awareness.

Here’s a direct link to the UberVu vs Topsy video if you’re reading this through a syndication channel.

Links mentioned:

• BackType Connect
• Tweetmeme
• Topsy
• UberVu

Upcoming videos in this series will be on Backtype Connect and one of my new recent features in Tweetmeme.

Here’s an oldie but goodie that I recently re-did and split into two videos. It’s all about examining basic information about your site in Google, but without logging into Google Webmaster Tools.

Hope you find these useful.

Part One:

Part Two:

Here’s the description that’s on the YouTube page:

“Did you know that Google has a page about your site that you don’t have to log into Google Webmaster Tool to use? This video shows any webmaster how to tell what Google knows about their site. You can learn when the Google spider was last at your site, what pages are indexed, what sites Google thinks yours are similar to, what high quality links are pointing to your site, and how many times your site is mentioned in external pages that Google has indexed.

Not only is the information itself valuable, not to mention handy in a pinch, there are things you can learn from what Google knows about your site that you may not even have thought of before.

This video is a sample from the 2009 version of the Hidden Google Traffic Tricks series.”

I’m back again, continuing the Facebook Business Basics series.  

If you went to my Facebook page, you saw two videos about how you can find people on Facebook who may be interested in you and let them come back to your site. This video talks about  what to do once you have someone viewing your profile.

Before we continue, I want to let you know I’m aware of the video embed problem with videos from my Facebook fan page.

Apparently even if you embed a video to a page, which is supposed to be visible to Everyone even outside of Facebook, some people still can’t see it.

So I’m uploading the videos to our free member site over at Leveraged Promotion, and using that embed code to feature them here.

If you couldn’t see Why Facebook Matters, The Psychological Side of the Facebook Experience, or Leveraging Your Profile via News Feed vs Other People’s Profile Promotion (otherwise known as Why Facebook Spam Fails), the new embeds visible to everyone are now live at those links.

You can become a fan of mine at Facebook to see all the videos in the series in one place. If you’re looking to be able to connect with me directly and don’t know me yet, that’s your best bet.

However, if we already know each other, you might want to join me at the social members section of Leveraged Promotion, where I have a members-only blog that’s updated with less frequency, but juicer tidbits.

Members are currently moderated and approved on a case by case basis. Generally if you’ve made a comment here, know me on Twitter/Facebook/StumbleUpon or have bought a product from me, you’ll be accepted as a free member – apply here.

That’s it for announcements. Oh, and we are back on the old site theme until next week when I hope to unveil 09′s custom theme.

Find more videos like this on Website Promotion for Regular Folks

(You may need to click through to the original post if the video isn’t showing up. You can also click the lower right corner of the video to go full screen.)

Technically speaking, where does the experience of Facebook largely take place? See why you can get better results posting to your own profile (which updates the news feed that goes out to your connections) rather than publishing on other people’s profiles.

I’ve got lots more Facebook video for you, to view them just go to my Facebook fan page in the videos section. The next three videos in the series give you an airplane view of what you need to do to be in the conversational and activity stream of information we just talked about.

Why do you want to be in that stream? Because that’s where the interaction is happening.

This morning, I read today’s TechCrunch’s article on VideoEgg and how they have introduced some smart options for web video advertising.

photo credit: pfala

I won’t go into all of the details of it here, but VideoEgg has come up with several options that don’t lean on pre-roll and post-roll. In addition, to emphasize engagement, you don’t have to pay for the ad unless the person watching it takes an action. If they don’t interact with the video ad, it costs you Nothing. Think of what that can do for your branding.

The way the ads are displayed in the examples, you can also see how the ads, muted but playing when the visitor arrives, can be served on regular web pages.

That got me thinking about the series I did on Web Video last year (and earlier on web video and traffic), and how publishers may now be at the tip of a movement that makes the ability to generate income from web video content a reality.

Right now Video Egg isn’t taking the average web publisher – they are specializing in those who run social networks, popular Facebook apps, some gaming sites and large-audience video publishers with their own flash player.

But the possibility that VideoEgg’s concept, or one like it by another advertising network, could allow you to place these eye-catching, targeted ads within your site’s content is exciting.

Ask Wallstrip.

(Feed subscribers: If all you’ve got is a blank space above, click through to see the video.)

4:11 of fun from Wallstrip. Learn the definition of “Googly”.

This is a Newsroom video, some people on the feed can see it, some can’t. If you can’t, click through to the site. Please and thank you!