Hauser lays out how they have used video and the “virality” of social media to generate buzz for their brand. In this example he outlines their strategy from concept to distribution.

So what did they do to get over one million views?

The title of the video on YouTube has some clues:

“THE NEW DORK – Entrepreneur State of Mind (Jay-Z ft Alicia Keys Spoof) | grasshopper.com”

Make a Killer Video
First they hired a firm that does this type of humor/parody/viral video. That doesn’t mean you have to though. If you have the skills in house, a great video can be made quickly and on the cheap. That said, if you have the budget, and you don’t know what you’re doing already, hire someone.

Grasshopper made a strategic decision to include numerous celebrity names and photos in the video. Some celebs only appeared as photo stills, some had their names woven into the lyrics, some both.

Free Promotion

Once the video was live they contacted those people. From the video transcript:

David: We reached out to every single person that was in there and said, “By the way, you were mentioned at second 1:22 with whatever it was. If it was TechCrunch, if it was Perez Hilton, if it was Ashton Kutcher, they got an email that said, “Go to this exact part of the video. Here’s where you are.” People love that. That’s all about their ego. So, people put it on their blogs. “Look, I’m mentioned here.”

Andrew: So, before you put the video together, you guys put together a list of influential bloggers and you said, “We got to include them in there.” And you took that to the video production company and you said, “Make sure to include their names in the song and make reference to them somehow.”

David: Yeah, absolutely. And some that aren’t even included in the song, we just had a picture of them flashing. We still emailed those people and said, “By the way, your picture’s in the video.” So, that was engineered, and we switched those people around during the production and made all sorts of choices. That was a very specific strategic move.

They also used social media including bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Hacker News, etc. Hauser points out though that they previously built their profiles and influence in those communities. Don’t think that you can just open an account today, post up your links tomorrow, and get much attention.

Of course, you should also use standard PR tactics like reaching out to popular bloggers (whether they’re in the video or not), and promoting things to your personal and business networks on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Paid Promotion

Grasshopper paid to be in YouTube Featured Videos. That virtually guarantees as many views as your budget can stand. You can also use ads on Facebook to target communities and people likely to spread it around.

David: There’s not a way to just make something viral. That happens once in a million. You actually have to engineer this and do it and pay for it.

There are a variety of other places you can try paid advertising including some networks that specialize in promoting viral videos.

The ROI of this kind of PR and marketing is not easy to measure. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try it though. We use a reporting system that monitors media mentions for all of our customers’ brand names and other unique terms to help us gauge what is getting noticed and where. As Hauser mentions elsewhere in this interview anyone can easily track media mentions of almost anything with Google Alerts.

I’d recommend creating a set budget for each promotion or campaign just for things like this. Then experiment. With some luck you, your company, or your product might become the next YouTube sensation. Like Nyan Cat! Over 16 million views?

Mixergy interview with David Hauser and Andrew Warner

Enjoy THE NEW DORK video from the folks at Grasshopper.

1. TubeReplay

This site features a super-simple premise. TubeReplay will play a YouTube video over and over again, until you stop it or go mad — whichever happens first. Just enter the URL of the clip you want repeated and the site will do the rest.

2. DragonTape

DragonTape allows you to remix YouTube videos into a seamless mixtape. Search for the clips you want, drag and drop to set up the play order and then share the playlist with friends via an auto-generated URL, or embed it with the code provided.

See all 12 Hacks at Mashable.

Here’s a quick lesson in using social media to market your business from my 12 year old (almost 13!) son Mars. He likes fingerboards, tiny skateboards you can ride using your fingers. Turns out millions of kids like them. And apparently a lot of those kids have Flips or other affordable ways of making videos to show off their skills and creative ideas for “skate parks.”

Just Google “fingerboarding” to see how popular it is. Most of the search results will be for Youtube videos. Many of these fingerboarders now have very popular channels on Youtube. These kids don’t know a world without the web and social media. Sharing and interacting online is completely natural to them.

Fingerboarding as a hobby has now branched into kids making their own boards, from scratch. There are even videos about how to do this. So serial entrepreneur Mars, who is always making something, decides he is now in the manufacturing game, albeit at the hand made level. He has some friends on Youtube who have become fingerboarding new media celebrities. This is how Mars plans to pull it all together to sell his product:

1. “Sponsor” some “celebrities” by giving them his products to use
2. Ask the celebs to “endorse” his fingerboards by using them in their next video, get a mention
3. Funnel that traffic to his own Youtube channel or Etsy store

Some high level steps to using social media for business, that every 12 year old already knows:

1. Interact, engage, comment, compliment, make friends in the networks that make sense for you
2. Create your own related media (tweets, videos, blog posts, etc.) to show you’re legit
3. Partner, sponsor, joint venture, with players bigger than you to tap into their audience

That is all for now. Tell me in the comments if there is something you want me to talk about.