EightBlack.

This session was presented by Steve Pearman, one of Tom Anderson’s top deputies (he’s currently SVP of Product Strategy).

Anderson is one of the co-founders of the social networking juggernaut, along with Chris DeWolfe.

Pearman rattles off some amazing numbers. Like 117 million unique users in March 08, 100 billion rows of data which can be mined anyway they like (not a typo, it reads “billions”), 85 gigs of bandwith, 50 million messages a day and so on.

Son of a bitch, that’s big.

If ever you needed a real live example of what scale means on the internet, then MySpace is it.

How do you possibly explain this without YouTube?

Video courtesy Marketing Hipster and via Seth Godin’s The Dip

With all the media surrounding YouTube, Google video et al I thought it would be good to write about the actual value that marketers can gain from creating viral videos. The guys at Marketing Experiments have put together a detailed report about the activity generated from 20 odd viral videos they created and posted to the above sites.

You can read the viral video results here in their detailed report. They take into account the cost and time taken in production and also the varying results generated from clicks throughs to subscribers added. Also, there is some great information about how best to maximise your viral video efforts. Make sure you read the “6 Essential Tips to maximize the Viral Potential of Your Videos”.

1. Keep your video clips short, preferable under 5 minutes. Most people browse through a number of videos when visiting sites like YouTube and Google Video, and may be unwilling to give any one video too much of their time.
2. Ensure that your video has interesting, entertaining or provocative content. If it doesn’t “wow” people, they will have little incentive to share it with other people they know, or across their social networks.
3. Be cautious about including commercial or promotional content. The most powerful short videos are those which are purely entertaining. It’s when people click through to your site that the time is right to add your sales message.
4. Don’t plan on creating just one video. It is hard, if not impossible, to accurately predict which videos will enjoy wide, viral distribution. Our own testing demonstrated that some videos were shared more than ten times as much as others. So plan on creating a series of clips, and learn from the one which performs the best.
5. Optimize your video clips to maximize distribution across social network sites, use tags and bookmarking links to help people find, save and share your videos.
6. Create videos that multiple people (possibly some of your customers) appear in. The best team of viral marketers you can hire are people who appear in your video and pass the video to their friends and family. (Source: http://www.marketingexperiments.com)