YouTube and viral videos

A good example of Social Network Marketing which included a video viral campaign was seen in April 2007.

This publicity might have been a coordinated strategy or simply a fortuitous accident - but regardless it has been very successful.

First we saw the “Otters Holding Hands” video on YouTube. Whether placed there by Vancouver Aquarium or uploaded by a visitor we don’t know, but by the time we had seen it, it had clocked up 2.5M views. (Now nearly 8M views ( July 07)

Very soon afterwards a virtual gift was made available on Facebook of “Otters Holding Hands”.

The idea here was that you would buy a "Virtual Gift" for $1 and give it to a friend of yours via Facebook.

The Facebook gift would then contain a link to the YouTube video..... and the whether purposefully or accidentally the message would be delivered.