Teach me something wonderful

Is it just me or does M-Net's September movie theme totally suck? Tonight I'm being treated with The Cutting Edge 3: Chasing the Dream. These dancers have been chasing the same dream since The Cutting Edge with seemingly no resolve. Maybe I should turn the music down and watch the movie with its original sound, but Of Montreal is just too good to stop for this rubbish.

Anyway, video has captured my attention over the past week, firstly because I watched this rad clip  about the Blue Whale on (one of) David Attenborough's YouTube channels; and secondly because Total Exposure was involved in disseminating an exlusive sneak peak at what's in store for SA's Got Talent viewers from October 1 via our channel.

Now of all the social media available on the Internet I have always had this affinity to YouTube, I don't know why but I think it mainly has something to do with the name and also the relative freedom people have to upload whatever they want or deem fit to broadcast. As a South African, growing up in a country where broadcasting is reserved only for the use (and abuse) by mega corporations, it is something to appreciate.

Coupled with that, there's the massive potential broadcasting has to influence a mass audience a.k.a, 'go viral'. This was the idea behind the Jaytee Turner SA's Got Talent YouTube clip. During meetings with the production company, official broadcaster and other stakeholders, it was my job to convince them to supply us with exclusive footage to be pushed online, a space where everything lives all the time. The lynch-pin in my argument was keeping the audience 'captivated' during the dead time between the auditions and the TX date, a six-week period.

So they agreed, and yesterday the clip went live. In the first few minutes thereafter it got about 150 views. My eyebrows raised slightly after the YouTube page refreshed. This encouraged me to hit the F5 key everytime I found myself on that tab in my browser. During the course of the day I saw the view count rise but not to my liking. Aren't so-called viral videos supposed to get hundreds of thousands (or at least thousands) of views at a rapid rate?

The mechanic around making the clip go viral was pretty standard: create hype, make it live, get the link, send it out to our agents to include in all communication they're involved in, and tweet (status update) it 'til the point of almost spamming. As a result, a few traditional publications picked up on it and it was re-tweeted and mentioned by some in the twittersphere. The view count, according to YouTube is now (at 10.30pm September 09, one-and-a-half days later), sitting at only 456. What went wrong?

Admittedly it is one of the fastest rising videos on our channel, but I have a feeling it's not enough. This is where you, dear time-wasting reader, has the opportunity to bash my methods by answering these questions:

1. Was the mechanic too aggressive and/or standard?

2. Is the clip not compelling enough?

3. Is there some tagging/optimization voodoo I omitted?

Go on, teach me something wonderful.

Yours in absolute sincerity,
Ahmed Patel