A couple of weeks ago the Huffington Post added a story with a video about the changing borders of Europe called – “Europe Map Video Shows Changing Borders, ’10 Centuries In 5 Minutes’ (VIDEO)”. The video is really cool, in under 5 minutes, you get to watch a history lesson about the changing borders in Europe.

In it’s first couple of weeks online, this movie had over 400,000 views on YouTube!

However, you can’t see it… The movie was taken down from YouTube because Centennia Software claimed copyright.

OK, let’s clarify this:

1. Someone other than Centennia Software uploaded the movie to YouTube, fair enough.
2. The Uploader didn’t have permission, again, fair enough.
3. The movie had over FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND VIEWS!

This means that potentially 400,000 people who have NEVER heard of Centennia Software saw this movie and were introduced to the products they provide.

As a marketing guy, I feel that Centennia Software blew it by claiming copyright and having the video removed from YouTube… Especially after the Huffington Post and AllTop posted the movie… My coaching would have been to take control the conversation and take credit for a video that had garnered over 400,000 views – and leveraged the viral nature of the internet to sell more software. Whoever is counseling these guys should be looking for a new job…

So how do you control the conversation?

In this case, If I were running their online marketing for them or advising them, I would have commented on the video. This would let YouTube visitors who were interested and commenting, know exactly who produced the movie, and in this case, explain that it is part of a software package that can be purchased online!

I would have contacted the poster and asked them to include my chosen description and clickable link to my site in the description. This would make it easier for viewers of the video to find me, my products, services and business.

Let’s keep going, I’m on a roll.

I would have commented on the Huffington Post article. It’s not every day that you get featured on a platform like that, right?! Taking that a step further, I would have contacted them and offered a piece for their blog about the purpose of the software.

So exactly what is their purpose?

They sell 1200 per year to all prospective naval officers at Annapolis (it helps with European History), they also sell to schools and geneologists.

Genealogy is cool. Maybe the Huffington Post would have been interested in a writing another article about genealogy.

How about ancestry.com – heard of them? Maybe they’d be interested…

Do you see where I am going with all this? If you are going to take advantage of marketing opportunities when they present themselves, sometimes you have to change your thinking.

Do you have some ideas to add to this? Please comment and share below.

Below, you can see a bit of the marketing movie from Centennia. This one has amassed a whopping 548 views… OUCH!

Oh you have to call the Nestle Hot line at 1-800-295-0051 When asked if you want to continue in English or Spanish, wait quietly for about 10 seconds (really, don’t say anything) just wait and listen for the next message – this is where it will connect the caller to about the funniest set of recordings ever.

You get to navigate through the various options where a series of surprise and funny messages are in store for the first time caller who do not know what to expect. This is a clever marketing gimmick of Nestle and it gets people to talk about it to their friends and also spread it through Facebook. The voice recording also ties into forthekidinyou.com which promptly redirects you to nestlecrunch.com playground site where there are number of games. It also has some Facebook type functionality. Be sure to look for the promotions tab in the top right hand corner.

Nestle also has a Facebook Fan Page for Nestle Crunch – where you can even get involve in the Crunch Challenge (and win $10,000). As of 2/27/10 the fanpage has 213,233 fans!

Listen to the audio – but by all means, go check out the whole enchilada by dialing 1-800-295-0051.

There is a great article in the new Fast Company Magazine all about the do it yourself social network “”Ning”.

The article begins by letting us in on a little secret:

Here’s something you probably don’t know about the Internet: Simply by designing your product the right way, you can build a billion-dollar business from scratch. No advertising or marketing budget, no need for a sales force, and venture capitalists will kill for the chance to throw money at you.

The secret is what’s called a “viral expansion loop,” a concept little known outside of Silicon Valley (go ahead, Google it — you won’t find much). It’s a type of engineering alchemy that, done right, almost guarantees a self-replicating, borglike growth: One user becomes two, then four, eight, to a million and beyond. It’s not unlike taking a penny and doubling it daily for 30 days. By the end of a week, you’d have 64 cents; within two weeks, $81.92; by day 30, about $5.4 million.

Yeah we all remember that little game, “I’ll give you $1 Million today or one single penny and double everyday for a month, which would you rather have?

Me? I’ll take the “Viral expansion loop” – but I want to call it the “Viral Spiral”.

This article goes on to explain how the viral loops (spirals) work as an accelerant for internet businesses – take Google, PayPal, YouTube, eBay, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Flickr as good examples.

So where does Ning fit in?

Well they use this concept on steroids! What they’ve got going is a “double viral loop”.

Only Ning, Andreessen declares, benefits from a “double viral loop,” which spreads two ways, because every network creator is a user and any user can become a network creator. Say someone sets up an Angelina Jolie net with 10 members, which grows as each person draws in others. Then an adoption site breaks off, a Jon Voight hate group rises up, and a Brad Pitt love club forms. Meanwhile, a Lara Croft nostalgia net launches, spawning a legion of soft-core cyberporn spin-offs. Soon you have 2, 3, 10 networks — all expanding simultaneously. Meanwhile, the original group is attracting even more users. Ning swells like a river fed from an ever-growing number of tributaries.

You can read the rest of the article here

But how do we launch our own Viral Video Marketing Campaign? Now that’s a good question…

Watch this video and learn. Great stuff!

Did you know that Blogger has its own channel on YouTube? I LOVE IT! The folks at Google, who own both Blogger and YouTube, have saved me the trouble of building my own Blogger tutorials. Talk about Good luck!

If you haven’t heard this from me before, Google is so loaded with great, free resources: From Gmail, to Webmaster tools, to Google analytics, to add words, and now these great blogger tutorials.

Blogger is such a great tool. Here’s how you work it. Create a blogger blog, making sure that you name the blog using the keywords you are targeting. Add a handful of relevant ARTICLES ( blog posts). Make sure that you use your keywords in the body of all the posts on this blog. Using the keyword method of linking, link that keywords or key phrases to the relevant page on your site. Not only are you getting “backlinks” you are getting back links from a site with relevant content using relevant keywords leading to a page with more relevant content.

What a great strategy to use.

As a little primer, here is a tutorial explaining how to set up your first Blogger blog.

What are you waiting for, get your blogger blog today. Here’s the link to the blogger tutorials.

Well, let me spell it out for you. Linkbaiting is a method to get other sites to link to your site. There are a lot of ways to do this including, giving away tools, having contests, being a really compelling blooger among others.

Darren Rowse gives us a pretty good list of linkbaiting techniques on Problogger.com.

In his list he includes some things like controversy and attack (to create controversy). Controversy maybe, but  if you are running a business site, the attack method may not be the best plan.

This year saw the emergence of a new buzzword in the digital music space — widgets. Next year, we’ll see if they do any good.

An offshoot of the global social networking trend, widgets are small applications that users can place into their blogs, profiles and Web sites, and thereby extend the functionality of an otherwise separate Web site or service. What’s more, users can simply copy widgets found on friends’ profiles and insert them onto their own, thus enabling a tremendously viral distribution opportunity.

Read the rest of the article:  http://uk.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUKN2849016520071229?sp=true