Current mood:

hopeful

How I got my first 2600 YouTube views for Ron Paul
Remember, Remember, the Fifth of November

The Fifth of November is Guy Fawkes day in England, but this year, it was also the planned date of the biggest "money bomb" so far for the Ron Paul presidential campaign in the U.S. After donating my $100, I got inspired to write something a little less violent for the day than the original Guy Fawkes rhyme. After sending my new version of the rhyme to a couple of mailing lists, I said to myself, "I should really make this into a video so I can post it on YouTube and see what kind of audience I can get."



I really needed to leave for Central NY (where I have some property), so the whole production had to be a quick little thing, no time for perfection. I searched the net for some pix to use for a cheesy slideshow to put to the poem, like 'everyone' does on YouTube. I tried not to take anything too obviously copyrighted, and the Ron Paul pix were all fine to use for this, of course. I mostly relied on http://Flickr.com to search for Ron Paul pix and rallies, but http://image.google.com for the rest.

The original rewriting of the poem took about a half hour (see the info box at YouTube for the words and a link to the original). The video, including the search for pix, multiple takes of an audio recording of the poem AND the blitzkrieg promotion, all took about 2 hours. It turned out the home computer has "Windows Movie Maker" on it -- not something I would have ever sought out, but perfectly sufficient for my needs, and rather simple to learn (assuming a basic level of computer knowledge).

I imported the pix I'd found, slapped the audio track for the poem down for my main timeline, and started dragging the pix onto to the timeline. I shuffled them around until it looked presentable, then uploaded it to YouTube.

URL: Fifth of November for Ron Paul
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHatG6Kq5OU

For promotion, I posted the YouTube URL to
- my Facebook "wall" -- my page's visitors may see it there, but more importantly, all my friends who view the "what's new in your network" homepage will see it
- embedded in a MySpace "bulletin" that all my friends see if they log in within the next ten days
- embedded in my MySpace "comments" area -- all my page's visitors will see it
- embedded in the "comments" area of about 10 of my 16 "top friends" on MySpace whom I knew would be receptive to it, so all THEIR visitors see it
- the "HQNH" Ron Paul Meetup board (but then after not being able to post to my local RP Meetup b/c I'm not a moderator, I didn't try any other Meetups)
- and I emailed it via Facebook 'specially to Aaron B. to pass out to his contacts, an important part of any Ron Paul-related viral strategy. ;-)

I searched YouTube, and a search for "Ron Paul November Fifth" did not and still does not return my video in the first bunch of results. So, the only intra-YouTube promotion I got (not having an established audience or a big network there) was presumably the "being viewed now" highlight at the top of their home page. I never caught it up there myself, because there are SO many videos being watched there all the time, but I assume I got a few views that way.

A way to "cheat" and get more views would have been to upload my video as a "response" to a wildly popular, possibly-related video, but I didn't do that, because that felt too cheesy. (I'm not ruling it out in the future, though. ;-)

I left for Central NY, and when I came back a couple of days later, my first YouTube video had 2600 views and 58 nice comments. Granted, I picked an already "viral" topic, Ron Paul, and hooked into existing networks to communicate the message***, but that's an advantage we all have.

I'll be doing another one for the next 'RP money bomb' date...December 15-16. A Boston Tea Party theme, I read (plus Bill of Rights day). I have more time for planning and promotion for that, so I expect the second one to do even better.

***Obviously, I need to try to get the message out beyond the existing Ron Paul network next time. This one was mostly for practice. I assume that at least 95% of my views were from the 'already converted.' However, if you get enough YouTube views, you'll get bumped up and start getting some intra-YouTube promotion, not to mention word-of-mouth.

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Stated bluntly, the consumer metaphor is "customer as eye, trainable neural system and wallet." That's the full text behind "eyeballs." - Esther Dyson

(We need to define our audience and add "voting" to the end of that chain.)


[This posting was originally written up to help and encourage my fellow Ron Paul supporters to do the same thing themselves.]