You gotta check out this WebProNews video interview at ACCM 08 of Steve Spangler - the science teacher turned catalog company CEO/Emmy award winner/keynote speaker/toy inventor:

In the video, Steve talks about how his Mentos + Diet Coke experiment turned into a YouTube sensation and how he was able to leverage it for his own marketing purposes. Steve is a client of ours and he even mentions Netconcepts (thank you Steve!!) as his experts behind the scenes helping him, which was really cool to hear.

Also in the video Steve shows off his cool flaming wallet, and how he is privileged to receive "special treatment" at airport security because of it. Um, yeah, that's not the kind of attention that you want, Steve

What you don't see in the video is that Steve also has a flaming business card holder. It's hilarious when he whips out one of his business cards and he has to put the fire out on the flaming card before he hands it to you. I'd LOVE to have one of those card holders and then troll the trade show floor and then hand over a flaming card to overaggressive, hard-selling vendors - but WITHOUT putting the fire out! hehe

From a social media marketing standpoint, YouTube isn't an ideal social site because of the way it hoards PageRank (video pages can't have external links on them, and external links are nofollowed everywhere anyways, including on your user page), so it can't be leveraged to increase your site's rankings in the same way that a site like Digg can. That's why a lot of SEOs and SMOs prefer submitting link bait articles to social news sites versus making videos for YouTube. When a video goes viral, it's YouTube that tends to benefit in terms of inbound links rather than the original site. So, if the link juice and thus the search engine visibility benefits don't transfer to your site, what's the point you may ask?

True, YouTube limits your opportunities to add external links and then nofollows them. But you can be at peace with that fact. Instead, get the YouTube video itself to rank in the SERPs. Long live Google's "universal search"!

With universal search, YouTube now wields a lot of power to rank in Google's web search results -- which means that getting into video is a good idea. Video blogging or trying to create something that has the potential to go viral can be a great thing for your business.

I especially love the "plus box" in universal search -- the clickable plus sign in a YouTube video containing Google SERP that allows searchers to watch the video right there, without leaving the page. It's a great opportunity to make a brand impression over a course of minutes, while the viewer watches your video.

So how do you optimize video content?

Obviously the spiders can't see what you say in the video so how are these things going to rank? When you upload a video to YouTube, there are a few important areas to optimize are:

• the title
• the description
• tags (keywords)
• and your YouTube username

What you call your video, the words you use in the description, and what tags you assign it, will make a difference when it comes to its ranking in the SERPs and for which keywords.

Step 1: When coming up with a good title and description for your video, remember to use the words you are trying to rank for. This might sound obvious, but it's just like if you were writing good titles and descriptions for a regular page on a site you were trying to optimize. Do not be too exact, but don't be too broad either. YouTube has the ability to rank for some fairly competitive words especially if there are not many videos about it. At the same time, however, if you title your video "Sports video" you're just wasting your time.

Make copious use of tags on your videos (assuming the tags are all relevant to the content), spread your tags out among your clips, use adjectives to make your videos more visible to folks searching based on their mood, have some category descriptor tags (bearing in mind that YouTube's default search settings are Videos, Relevance and All Categories), match your title and description with your most important tags, and don't use throwaway words like "and" or "to."

Your YouTube username is an often neglected but important piece, because it can drive traffic to your site and help burn your brand in the viewer's brain. Consider the famous "Will It Blend?" videos from Blendtec, where they blend iPods, rake handles, light bulbs and the like. Blendtec cleverly set their username to "willitblend.com" to promote their microsite. Granted, it's not actually an external link (it still points to a YouTube user page), but it provides bloggers and journalists with a URL to use in their blog post or article besides (or in addition to) the YouTube video URL.

Read more on YouTube marketing in this article I wrote for MarketingProfs last year.

Success on YouTube is as much about effectively tapping the social network as it is about the content. Brand-building viral videos such as the ones I blogged about recently only happen if the conditions are right.

If you don't follow MarketingProfs, you may not have seen that my article "How to Market on YouTube" came out this week. For the article I had interviewed the marketing director at Blendtec about their famous "Will It Blend?" videos. "Will It Blend?" is one of my favorite examples of viral marketing on YouTube. It didn't take a big budget and an ad agency to dream it up, but boy did it work wonders for their brand!

So what are the secret ingredients to going viral on YouTube? I guess you'll have to read my article to find out! ;-)

It can be really hard to compete for eyeballs in YouTube with so many videos being posted every day. Some marketers manage to stand out in the crowd with their videos. Here are a few I think are worth mentioning...

• Will it Blend? by Blendtec -- Tom Dixon, founder of Blendtec, made a whole series of videos of himself blending all sorts of crazy things in his rugged and seemingly indestructible blenders, including marbles, iPods and rake handles.
• Sue Teller by Mountain Dew. Here is an elderly lady who is really down with the haps sharing her streetwise tips for young people. It is a real hoot.
• TaxRap contest by Intuit's TurboTax division -- They recruited rapper Vanilla Ice to kick off their video contest where you can rap about taxes and maybe win $25,000. Nice integration of celebrity endorsement (which incidentally, Intuit got for a very reasonable price), consumer generated content, and a contest with a highly motivating prize.
• Mr Cupid by Ice.com. Ice.com founder Pinny Gniwisch made his first foray into YouTube marketing as "Mr. Cupid" -- his code name on the streets of Manhattan, on the slopes in Utah, and places in between, where he asks passers-by questions about Valentines Day. Some of these clips are quite humorous and Pinny shows his stuff as being a very talented interviewer.
• Zeros by NBC. This is a spoof on the popular TV show Heroes. Very funny. It isn't immediately obvious that NBC is behind it, but it's a bit too professional to have been done by an amateur. So when it was revealed that NBC was behind it, it wasn't a big surprise.
• Tea Partay by Smirnoff -- This one is done as a music video and is really hysterical.

I have to say I prefer YouTube over Google Video, although the audio tends to be out of sync with the video, it's hard to locate the gems from all the crap, a lot of the comments are "if you liked that then check out this video" spams, and you can't download the videos for offline viewing.

Here's why I think YouTube rocks:

• It's developed a large, active community of users who comment on videos, rate videos, become friends, create favorites and playlists, etc.
• The way you can embed videos into your blog or site (see example below) is really well done
• Videos can have tags associated with them
• It's so easy to get sucked in to watch more videos once you're in there, through Related Videos, Playlists, Director Videos, Most Viewed, Top Rated, Most Discussed, Top Favorites, Most Linked, Recently Featured, Most Recent and Random

I'm not alone in my opinion that YouTube has Google Video beat. The Church of the Customer blog offers up 10 reasons why YouTube is better than Google Video, which include the vastly superior user interface, the viral "pass it on" and "put on site" functions, superior playback performance, the display of the number of times each video has been played, the user accounts, better search functionality (e.g. the ability to sort search returns by date added, title, view count and rating), the way three random frames from each video are displayed next to search results, the display of trackbacks, and the related video functionality.

Here's my favorite YouTube video to date. It's a segment from a Japanese game show called "Gaki no Tsukai ya Arahende" (Silent Library), where contestants suffer more and more outrageous tortures without being able to utter a sound:

My second favorite is the series of Star Trek action figure videos, including Crib, Karaoke and Poolside. You've got to check those out too.

Got any favorites to share?