Remember our post about Viral Video Marketing?  Well, with a rather season viral element to it, Visual Domain presents to you one of the funniest videos all year. Up to 3 million hits already, how many more will it have by Christmas Day?

For all us non-marketing guru’s, the idea of Viral Marketing may sound a bit bizarre as the word ‘viral’ is mostly used in the medical field; but it in this case, it actually makes a whole lot of sense. The snazzy term refers to trendy new techniques and social networks that help spread the word on your business and increase brand awareness.

Across the globe 2010 saw a huge increase in viral video marketing promotions and this was the case throughout a variety of industries. And no doubt it will be on top of the 2011 list for millions of businesses around the world- including Australia. Whether you are a real estate agent,  recruitment agent , fashion designer, car dealer, or anyone who has a website for their business; using videos to promote your product or service is a great step towards success.

This type of marketing has an abundance of advantages to the online business owner and can increase incoming hits and traffic. Really, the concept of this style of marketing is quite simple, yet extremely effective. Viral video outlets are now considered as new global marketing tools that will effectively change the way business and companies advertise themselves.

Here at Visual Domain we have spent a number of years happily producing professional videos for a variety of clients Australia wide. It’s very exciting for us to know that nowadays all these new and cool social devices will give our clients the opportunity to use their videos in more ways, which in turn will help increase profit margins.

Viral video marketing means you can distribute video clips to groups of people, whereby this group of people will then send it on to other people; creating a fabulous domino effect that every business longs for. Viral media marketing strategy is fantastic, powerful and effective.

Check out this prime example of viral video marketing by Old Spice.

To put it in simple terms- it’s ‘word of mouth’ marketing online. Your professional videos can be submitted to numerous video sharing websites so that search engines can view it. So we are talking Google, Yahoo, iTunes, YouTube and the list goes on.

Apart from that, the business videos that you are submitting are also helping your website to increase its page rank on the top search engines because these videos promoting your products and services, along with the keywords that you have tagged are seen by search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

Now stay tuned as we will be revealing some hot tips very soon on how to optimise the potential of Viral Video Marketing to make your business stand out from the crowd.

The power of social media, in particular Twitter, has recently being  proven in quite extraordinary circumstances. The ongoing cricket test (something called The Ashes?) has proved to be a rather lacklustre affair, however with some accidental ‘hashtagging’ and intelligent tweeters, the series has proved to be rather exciting OFF the field.

For those unfamilar with how Twitter works, every Tweep’s profile is preceded by an @. For example, to tweet Visual Domain you write @visualdomain. To tweet about a topic, start a trend or write something funny, you use a #. For example, a popular hashtag is #firstworldproblems- used after you tweet about something minor like “They didn’t have my favourite colour for my manicure today.”

So, where was I. Yes, so instead using a hashtag to discuss the ashes- #theashes- Twitter novices uses @theashes. Incidentally, this turned out to be a 22 year old American woman called Ashley Kerekes, nickname obviously The Ashes. When it first started, she was furious, tweeting “I AM NOT A FREAKING CRICKET MATCH”. She didn’t even know what a cricket match was at this point! However, she soon realised maybe she had reacted too soon. People jumped on the bandwagon and were soon tweeting @theashes on purpose. She went from under 300 followers to nearly 14,000 in almost a week- staggering numbers.

By then, such was the novelty of repeatedly tweeting @theashes, that corporate tweeters started taking notice. A campaign was started to #gettheashestotheashes. Vodafone, an official sponsor, adored the idea and said they would provide Ashley with tickets and a phone if she could get here. And so wasn’t it handy that at this point in time, as Qantas were having major public relations problems with engine problems, that they decided to offer @theashes an airfare to get to Australia? What a way to take the heat off a corporate disaster. And don’t you wish you had a coincidental famous name?

Ashley is now (almost) a household name in Australia, and she has certainly managed to milk her 15 minutes of fame with appearances on shows like Today and national radio programs. This story is really a testament to the power of social media and how one accidental tweet can lead to a nationwide wave of attention.

And in business terms- how many people really are paying attention to what you tweet. Use it to your advantage.

Next Wednesday, we’ll be posting a blog about how big corporates like Optus, Australia Post & Myki are using Twitter to communicate with their consumers.