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There’s a great post on TechCrunch right now by Dan Ackerman Greenberg, co-founder of viral video marketing company The Comotion Group. In it, Dan shows the methods he uses to make their videos “viral.” It includes methods such as:

1. Pay bloggers to embed the videos
2. Start forum threads and embed their own videos. From the post:
   

   We start new threads and embed our videos. Sometimes, this means kickstarting the conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different users. Yes, it’s tedious and time-consuming, but if we get enough people working on it, it can have a tremendous effect.

3. Taking advantage of facebook by sharing the videos with friends and creating an event announcing the launch of the video.
4. Sending the video to email lists.
5. Commenting or “Having a conversation with yourself.”

A great way to maximize the number of people who watch our videos is to create some sort of controversy in the comments section below the video. We get a few people in our office to log in throughout the day and post heated comments back and forth (you can definitely have a lot of fun with this). Everyone loves a good, heated discussion in the comments section - especially if the comments are related to a brand/startup.

In the comment section, Michael Arrington said:

1. Michael Arrington

   November 22nd, 2007 at 12:25 pm

   I will post a longer response to this later, but frankly I’m disgusted by this.

and

1. Michael Arrington

   November 22nd, 2007 at 12:29 pm

   I think it would have been better to have published this anonymously, and certainly without the links to Dan’s business.

So Dan replied:

1. Dan Ackerman Greenberg

   November 22nd, 2007 at 12:49 pm

   Quick response:

   What we do is grease the viral wheels. If that means commenting back and forth between fake users, who cares? It’s all about entertainment - we’re just making the whole experience entertaining, not just the video itself.

   Dan

And a heated discussion ensued, only to be cleared up by TechCrunch writer Mark Hendrickson:

1. 1. Mark Hendrickson

      November 22nd, 2007 at 6:01 pm

      I’ll just jump in here to give you all a better sense of how this post came about. I met up with Dan and he was telling me about his business, which I find very interesting regardless of its ethicality. It occurred to me that a “tell-all” of sorts would be informative and eye-opening to our readers, so I asked him if he wanted to write a guest post. Despite how Mike’s comments may have sounded, Dan’s contribution did go through an editorial process before we published. It wasn’t meant to promote his business nor condone his actions but merely to shine some light on this surreptitious form of marketing.

So what do you think? Is this a practice that you just assumed was already going on?  Or are you like Michael Arrington and are disgusted by it?

Filed under: NaBloPoMo, transparency