Attention Conservation Notice: The following post contains 20 ideas for packaging, promoting and tracking the results of your viral video campaign. It also contains visuals from The B2B Lead Vidcast on viral video marketing.

As I’ve written previously on The B2B Lead, many Marketers advise there is no simple formula for making your campaign go viral. Others argue that they can help anyone go viral and will use less than authentic and transparent techniques to do so. As you can see from this vidcast case study for a B2B viral video campaign NetQoS ran, it is possible to be successful without resorting to trickery. It just takes relevant content, clever packaging, a solid conversion strategy, and transparent outreach via Social Media.

However, even with a good idea and superb execution, there are no guarantees. Viral marketing is like walking a tight rope. There is a fine line between success and failure. There are no assurances. No opportunities for testing messages. And it could backfire or simply fizzle. But the great thing about walking a tight rope is that no one can pass you.

Want to improve your odds in the world of B2B viral marketing? Here is a roundup of the 20 ideas that made the NetQoS network monitoring campaign a success, and some of the charts and graphs that you might not have been able to see on the video.

Viral Video Idea #1: Set clear objectives for your campaign. For NetQoS, we wanted to use viral marketing to increase brand awareness, break into the blogosphere in a big way and increase web traffic and leads. We set specific objectives and measured our success.

Viral Video Idea #2: Be relevant. Make sure your message and content are relevant both to your company and to your target audience. Because without relevant content, you may hit a home run but effectively strike out. Kind of like that dancing baby concept from the 90’s. Can you name the company behind that one?

Viral Video Idea #3: Know your audience. And, I’m not talking about their pain points and job roles. I’m talking more about psychographics and behavioral characteristics. Understand what interests them, where they live and work, how they get their information. For NetQoS, we knew that our audience would be a great viral target—they were comfortable online, 80% read blogs or are active in blogging, 84% start their search on a search engine. Most are smart and cynical audience—marketing averse.

Viral Video Idea #4: Be opportunistic. – Have your FlipVideo on you at all times to capture a great idea or moment. I heard a story about one of the leading open source database providers recently. Apparently, a Marketer for that company had a great idea for a video. He Twittered his circle of contacts to round up a video camera and by the time he was ready to shoot, his competitor had already heard about the idea and beat him to the punch.

For us, we were lucky enough to have the right video material right under our nose. A senior researcher had developed a 3D video-game like data visualization of our product data. It converted live Network Performance data from our products into 3D images. It was unique and very, very relevant.

Viral Video Idea #5: Have fun. As I wrote in this blog post from The B2B Lead, you should make fun of yourself before someone else does. We were extremely kitschy because we knew the quality of the graphics was not up to the realistic standards of today’s CGI. It had a very 80’s Tron like feel so we made the most of that. We didn’t just post the clip. We named it, packaged it and added humor at every turn.

Viral Video Idea #6: Develop a seeding and conversion strategy prior to posting your video. In 30 days with less than $7,000, our in-house team along with our team at Porter Novelli developed the strategy and materials for a complete viral video experience including seeding the campaign, welcoming viewers and offering additional content as well as a program for building a following after the campaign.

Viral Video Idea #7: In the world of viral video, production value isn’t important. In fact I would discourage it. Ours looked like some techies had cooked it up in their spare time. In fact, that’s how it started. But we did put a great deal of thought into the packaging, promotion and conversion strategy for the campaign. It is important to always provide a thumbnail image of what the viewer is getting.

Viral Video Idea #8: Protect your brand. You can make fun of yourself but don’t do anything that will embarrass you or the company. Don’t take chances with controversial content or release anything of such poor quality that you create a negative brand image. Don’t use dubious tactics to get noticed or bait and switch techniques. We explained very clearly what Netcosm was (a data visualization) and was NOT (a product for sale). We also made it clear that the work was done through NetQoS Performance Labs and not beta tested.

Viral Video Idea #9: YouTube reports that the average viewing time for videos is 15 to 30 seconds. You have a very short runway to take off. Get to the point fast, entertain and leave them wanting more. We added captions based on the old “This is brain, this is your brain on drugs” campaign. We selected clips that showed the most action and had some fun with the content. Then we offered a longer video if people were interested in seeing more.

Viral Video Idea #10: Somewhere between 40,000 to 65,000 new videos are posted to YouTube every day. Help people find it by optimizing for search engines: Tag it, name it appropriately, describe it, add links and compelling copy and optimize using the right keywords. If it takes off in a big way, you want as many links to your content as possible using your top keywords.

Viral Video Idea #11: Use your corporate blog to trigger the viral distribution and keep the story alive. You’ve got to get the word out and a press release is simply not appropriate for viral marketing. What’s more, blogging with the full story behind the campaign helps to give your program and your company a face and a personality. Make sure that personality is one that will garner respect by being completely open and honest on your blog.

Viral Video Idea #12: Build a community of interest. This is the core message behind my prior B2B Lead post on the subject of viral video marketing. Don’t use trickery or bait and switch to get people to your video because you will be forgoing one of the most valuable benefits of the viral approach – the ability to quickly and inexpensively build a community of interest. The Word of Mouth aspect of viral marketing gives Marketers a powerful way to attract a following. Do this by explaining each step of the program using your blog. Tell your audience what you were thinking when you produced it. Report on the results. Give followers a way to track the momentum and keep it alive.

Viral Video Idea #13: Seed the story with the blogerati, your customers and friends, your social network. Post it to Digg and Reddit or whatever social media site is appropriate for the topic. Twitter your followers. Leverage Social media like Facebook, MySpace, and other groups to spread the word. Of course timing is everything. Here’s a high level snapshot of our timeline.

Viral Video Idea #14: Track and monitor the results and keep your followers and the blogging community posted on the momentum building behind your viral video. This helps build excitement and credibility around how your video is resonating with the audience. It might just convince an influential blogger that he/she should write a story about you. We not only tracked YouTube views and Most Viewed Honors, but we also monitored:

• Google Analytics for web traffic
• Google Alerts for media and blog coverage
• Salesforce.com for leads and evaluation requests as well as revenue opportunities
• Eloqua for clickstream analysis to determine if people were using the right path from the blog story to the video to the microsite and finally to product pages and offers

Viral Video Idea #15: Automate and expedite lead processing. When viral goes big, it really goes big. And, studies show that B2B Marketers and Sales reps need to follow-up on Web-generated leads within 30 minutes of a registration or the chances for conversion are poor. If you don’t have a great program for automatically scoring and qualifying leads so that you can route quality leads to your salesforce instantly, you could be asking for big trouble using viral. First of all your Inside Sales team is likely to be swamped with a larger percentage of irrelevant leads. Secondly, you will miss out on a number of great sales opportunities by taking weeks to respond. We were actually given the Marketer’s Choice award by Eloqua for our Lead Scoring and Automation program that enabled us to process the leads generated by our viral campaign within 24 hours. Eloqua’s Marketing Automation was critical to this process.

Viral Video Idea #16: Demonstrate that you met your objectives. YouTube will allow you to track some of your results, but it won’t show the whole story. Here are a few results that NetQoS tracked:

• YouTube Views: 66,000 and growing. (This did not include those who viewed it on Google video, Tech Crunch or other blogs.)
• Blog Coverage: 70+ blogs wrote about the video.
• NetQoS Blog Readership: Traffic more than tripled.
• NetQoS Corporate Web traffic: YoY 43% higher
• Organic SEO: As the chart below shows: weighted market exposure for NetQoS top keywords increased by 41% for all keywords plus 600% on the primary keyword.

Viral Video Idea #17: Show your campaign delivered value to the business. You most certainly will have to do a lot of convincing to get sponsorship for your viral campaign, so don’t miss your chance to prove to all of the skeptics that the idea was worth the investment. Show that the spike in traffic and coverage hit the right audience and generated brand awareness or demand. For us, the results show it was:

As the charts below show, there was a spike in web traffic for all product pages and a large 4X increase in Web-based leads. We also showed a 26% increase in product demo requests. Our cost per qualified lead was $16. Other techniques range from $60 per qualified lead for Google AdWords to $250 or more from a seminar or online advertising campaign.

Viral Video Idea #18: So, show me the money. Viral video, like any other Marketing campaign, should always demonstrate a positive return. While it is still too early for us to show revenue, we do have more than a half a million in pipeline from this campaign that cost $7,000.

Viral Video Idea #19: Don’t forget to subtly brand the video and microsite with your company name. Don’t be overly obvious or slick. The point is to entertain and encourage people to spread the word while subtly associating your company with the content.

Viral Video Idea #20: It’s not over when it’s over. Extend the life of your campaign. You’ve done the hard work to build a community of interest, so keep them interested and the lines of communication open. Evolve your story, and continue to post updates. For NetQoS, we turned the Netcosm experience into a live event and continued to post about it on our blog.

When we first embarked upon this viral video campaign, there was no playbook. The NetQoS Marketing Team, Dr. Mike Johns, and the Porter Novelli Austin team all worked together to figure it out. Now we are sharing our playbook with you. Let us know if you’ve had success using it or your own techniques.