Can You Fake Your Way to Viral Video Success? Los Angeles CA

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Originally published at Internet.com

An eye-opening column on technology blog TechCrunch shows some of the ways that viral marketers tweak YouTube to create viral video sensations. While the post has created controversy, it also offers several valuable lessons for online video creators.

A guest post last week written by Dan Ackerman Greenberg, co-founder of viral video marketing company The Comotion Group and a Stanford grad student, detailed the meticulous and borderline-shady ways that a viral marketer can create a YouTube hit.

It's Greenberg's job to make sure that his clients' videos go viral, and so he often works secretly to bring attention to them. Among Greenberg's tips: * Keep your work short (very short: 15 to 30 seconds) * Design your video for remixing by others * Don't let it feel like an add * Make it shocking * Appeal to sex

The most controversial part of the column, however, came from Greenberg's strategies for getting coverage from blogs and forums-which include writing multiple posts under fake names and paying bloggers for coverage.

Greenberg also advises video makers on how to create a title and a thumbnail image that pulls in viewers. YouTube generates thumbnails automatically from the middle frame of the video, so Greenburg says to make sure the middle frame shows something interesting.

One novel strategy, one that Greenberg says his company created, involves using completely unique keywords on YouTube videos, so that YouTube's automatically-generated related video list leads viewers to your other content.

Greenberg's posting generated a lot of heat from TechCrunch's readership, who were angered by what they viewed as deceptive and manipulative practices. Greenberg answered the comments two days later in a follow-up posting, in which he said that editing errors were introduced into this text, and that he had only paid bloggers to include clearly labeled video ads.