Making Sense of Web PR and Viral Video Techniques

Catching up on my HR Marketer reading, I found their post, Promoting Solar Toasters which touted this PR Web in Plain English video. It’s not often that my overtaxed brain gets enlightened thrice in one post, but today was such an occasion.

1. HR Marketer’s RSS Feed contained a little video icon next to the post in my Yahoo RSS Reader. I want to know how they did that. It seems to be a function only of the fact that the post had a video linked within it. This certainly caught my eye, and is something I’d like to have with my posts containing embedded video. I’ll have to look into it.

   

2. The lesson within the video of how PR Web works and the best way to spread PR online was enlightening. The fishing in the stream metaphor is brilliant.

   I’m definitely going to forward the video to our PR manager.

3. Which leads me to my third insight – the beauty of the work being created by commoncraft. They are the company behind all of these ‘paperworks‘ videos. Their seemingly simple technique to illustrate complex ideas is very cool. I’m sure this style of video is here to stay, and we’ll be seeing a lot more of them. I predict their viral factor will be inversely related to the number of times the technique is applied. For instance, I appreciate the illustration of new lightbulbs below especially because my wife just made me change over all the bulbs in our house. However, the technique loses impact in comparison to the illustrations of highly complex internet concepts.

Anyway, I consider myself enlightened today by the strong technique of a few good internet marketers. It’s time to go make icons show on my RSS feeds, send Hudson releases to PR Web, and make videos from scraps of paper and hand gestures.