Source: Tubemogul

Arguably the above mentioned people are not household celebrities like Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise, but if you look at their audience numbers and their age you would be impressed.  The chart to your left displays some of the most viewed and subscribed to YouTube partners. For those who don’t know a YouTube partner is a video producer that uploads videos to YouTube and gets paid for it.  Solid little gig.  Let’s put it in a little equation for you: little production cost + small overhead (1 person generally) + multi million dollar employer (Google) + 100 000 subscribers = lots of views and 1 nice paycheck.   

Essentially, what these YouTube partners have going for them is their very own television station.  Their personalities come out in full and they get paid to film whatever they want.  Traditional television takes a lot to set up and involves a lot of risk in the hopes of building an audience and getting advertisers to pay attention.  Google on the other hand doesn’t mind cutting a check every month to people who have gained popularity simply by filming and publishing a large aspect of their life. 
 
There are a couple great features to this new model for media that no other medium has replicated.  When ShayCarl or CharlesTrippy posts a video, it’s not a 22-minute event broken up with ads.  Instead its quick slap in the face of entertainment that is available for free anytime you want.  So when a viewer searching the keywords for a video ends up watching it a year after its original posting date it still counts as a view and well more money.  Television shows on the other hand make their money while their on air; YouTube videos make their money indefinitely. 
 
The Internet will help discover celebrities like no other talent agent in the world as it already has.  This is the reason Jon Lajoie is mentioned  at the beginning of this article.  Just listen to Regular Everyday Normal Guy and you will see why YouTube is the worlds largest talent pool.  The song takes everything a rap video promotes and spins it on its head while keeping to the style.  Brilliantly original. 
 
If you haven’t heard of the above mentionedpeople maybe it’s because you have never searched around on YouTube or maybe you don’t like the webcam style of videos.  But if you ever take the time to look around the community on YouTube you will start to notice some people coming up over and over.

One thing is for sure though, the traffic stats for YouTube are increasing not decreasing and that my friend is what we call a movement – not a fad.  You write us the day you see YouTube stats start going down consecutively and we will rewrite this article.  Until then pay attention to the name after the slash.  Cheers!

The AV Team

The San Francisco company has launched a new viral effort it hopes will attract young men to pass along videos of customized “beasts” emerging from the button-fly of Levi’s jeans. At Unbuttonyourbeast.com, visitors can choose from nine different animated characters with names like Trout Troutman, Paul the Pincher and Sock Nasty, then customize the beast’s message by calling a toll-free number. The effort, unsurprisingly, is geared to young men just out of college.
 
The e-mail arrives with the subject “Do you dare to unbutton my beast?” Users can customize the message to friends. The default borders on the risque, reading, “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you, but I don’t want to freak you out. That’s why I’m sending my beast to do my dirty work.” Senders receive a confirmation e-mail that their message was sent — along with a 15 percent off coupon for jeans.
Source: Adweek

While the creativity and technical savy is definately there the interaction has some disturbing elements to it.  With a couple creatures appearing from the crotch of Levi’s 501 jeans looking like they just stepped out of B horror movie, it is unclear whether the young male target will really relate to this.  I bet some guys will get a kick out of it, but I would hazard a guess that most guys don’t relate their male member to a honkey tonk pig or a jewel wearing crab claw.

No one doubts that sex sells.  The ability for users to personalize the message by calling a toll free number has some appeal, but I’m not sure if girlfriends and boyfriends alike will appreciate the inivitable love note from the “Cookie The Cougar” character which looks like something out of Alien vs. Predator.

Time will only tell if Unbuttonyourbeast.com sees some viral success, but the saving grace for the site and the messaging is that this latest initiative is part of a broader itegrated campaign.  Would be players in social media take note.   

Levi’s has already seen some admittedly surprising results with the release of “Jumpin’ In” on YouTube with over 4.4 million views thus far.  “['Jumpin' In'] was supposed to be a small seeding activity,” said Robert Cameron, VP of Marketing, Levi Strauss, San Francisco. “We didn’t know it was going to blow up.”

The video is part of a series produced by Cutwater, the same people who produced the Ray-Ban “Catch” videos.  While no one at either the agency or Levi’s could have predicted its success the video has a universally appealing theme.  Backflips it seems resonate with young males and probably more so than crotch humor.

The positive take on these efforts is the willingness of Levi’s to jump in (no pun intented) to the new social media space as they try to reinvent a brand for their younger male target.  After all it is stories like these that inspired AboutViral.

Welcome to the official release of AboutViral.com

Over the last few months our team has been laying the foundation for some truly exciting things to come. The world of online marketing is changing at an ever increasing pace and we wanted a place to share thoughts, ideas, and research into some of the successes and misses. Out of that desire AboutViral.com was born.

We hope this site will become the place to be for news, reviews, and how to’s for marketers in the social web.

A big shout out and many thanks to Chad Holmes for his creative flair and dedication to bringing this blog to life. Your technical know how has been invaluable to the team. We now have a place to express the millions of ideas and observations floating around our heads as we surf the net and dive deeper into the social graph.

As a couple of guys working in the experiential marketing field we believe that social media is the next frontier in consumer experience and ultimately brand connection. Social media coupled with the right idea and strategic execution can be that “ace up the sleeve” or “hard right hook” to any full bodied campaign; its illusive, unpredictable, but when it hits, it’s a knock out. Please check out the About Us page if you want to learn more about who we are.

The foundation of a viral hit is based on sharing. Therefore it would only be right that we provide an outlet for that too. If you have a campaign that you want featured on AboutViral.com or come across an interesting video that is on its way to viral success please submit it to us via the Share the Love page.

Stay tuned and subscribe below.

The AV Team.

Andrew Cherwenka of Trapeze presented on behalf of Facebook platform developers. His most important comment about the “new” Facebook is that it will be simpler for the user. New to the user interface will be a series of tabs at the top of the screen, “Creating a photos tab to handle the billions of photos was simply a priority.  Other improvements include an info tab on your profile and the customizable newsfeed.  Now you can decide how important things are for your friends to see by changing the size of information on the Minifeed.  First off it was great to come together and meet all the developers of new applications.  On display were some widely known applications like Mouse hunt, and the FedEx package as well as some up and comers like Refresh, Slangbook, and Praized.

In my opinion Facebook applications are like a sleeping giant. There are countless examples of rehashed ideas popping up with a slight tweak here or an adjustment there. For example, Praized, one of the applications showcased looks like something that may catch on. It utilizes user input to generate valuable knowledge for those who may be searching for pretty much any business. Praized visually displays areas, buildings, establishments that much like Digg, or any online voting system, can be ranked.

We already have these review based consumer sites on the web, think Yelp.  Restaurantica has been running for years and has hundreds of thousands of reviews on restaurants. What may push Praized to the forefront are two simple features. One, it will rank any business and two it has social networking built in thanks to Facebook. Imagine if Restaurantica had a personal profile to back the comments being submitted. The social networking aspect of this App has strategically linked the confidence of ones own network of friends into an opinionated map of the city.

Mouse hunt on one hand looks great. Very visual and appealing but the skepticism remains as to how long people will continue to buy their virtual cheese. Interesting none the less and here’s hoping the talent of the organization will push out more great applications in the months to come.

Monetizing the applications was the question of the night. So what was the answer? According to Rebecca Sawyer, Director of Monetization for Facebook, the best way to make money on your App was to buy advertising on Facebook to catapult the viral spread. She stated upfront the presentation “was not a sales pitch,” but really what else could it be. Here top five points were nothing new for advertising. Target your audience, write compelling headlines and copy, use multiple ads, then measure and optimize. That strategy is the key to success not matter the medium. 

However, if you are like most independent developers you have put all your dollars into development. Most of this group is looking for the Holy Grail in the way of sponsorship. A relevant game can generate sponsorship like MGM’s recent sponsorship of the up and coming Flip Cup game to help promote the soon to be released movie College targeting youth. The App is still a work in progress and the next round of improvements are set for August according to the brains behind it, Keith Canivet.

If there was ever to be a killer App it may be thanks to the event sponsor Refresh Partners. Their new analytics tool claims to be able to provide aggregate demographics of App usage. This measurement is going to help developers and marketers report back to clients on their success of integrating a brand into the social network. But all of this is still in its infancy. Apparently development of this was only two weeks. Seems to be an awfully short development time for something of this magnitude (but then again I’m not a coder). I am going to be keeping a close eye on this one to see what impact it has on this budding industry.

The most rewarding part of the night was seeing how eager everyone is to jump into this emerging market. And coming from this blogger once companies learn how to integrate their brand with an application, release it in the right virtual market with a solid measuring system for ROI we will see more growth in major corporate spending.

Stuart Dykstra with notes from Doug Watson