It’s a fact: 18 to 25 year olds don’t vote. This fact has inspired numerous attempts across North America to inspire this critical demographic with targeted events like Rock the Vote and by celebrities like Drew Barrymore making appeals about exercising your rights. Response is typically luke warm.

So why then are there “Vote Mobs” cropping up in colleges and universities all across Canada? Who is responsible for mobilizing the nation’s youth and what was the secret?

For those you don’t know, a “Vote Mob” is a gang of young people who suddenly meet up in rally-like formation, cheering and shaking signs with messages like, “Surprise! We’re voting!” to show Canada’s leaders that they are not a demographic that should be ignored. Vote Mobs are filmed and shared on YouTube via Facebook and Twitter.
So what young star inspired Canada’s students? What rock band finally uttered the magic words to make our youth care who runs this country? Who devised this viral sensation that swept the nation with such force the Conservatives are trying to invalidate special ballots at Canada’s universities? In the end, it was a 40-something politically inclined comedian from St. John’s and he did it by doing what he always does: by dissecting the hearts and minds of Canada’s political leaders.

On Sunday, March 30, Rick Mercer published a post on his blog titled “Vote”. In this short blog post he writes, “It is the conventional wisdom of all political parties that young people will not vote. And the parties, they like it that way. It’s why your tuition keeps going up.” He went on to urge the nation’s youth to “scare the hell out of the people who run this country” by voting this election. That’s it.

Authenticity

Rick Mercer is a political satirist. He loves Canada and he loves everything to do with the politics that run it. He also loves pointing out what’s wrong with our system and the leaders who work within it. Yet, he is impartial. If Rick wants you to vote, it’s because he believes in democracy, not because he wants “his guy” to win.

Autonomy

Rick didn’t tell the kids to hold Vote Mobs. He inspired them because he’s smart and funny and because it’s important to vote. Then he let the idea take on its own life. This is critically important with viral campaigns. Too often I hear clients tell me what their audience is going to do to make their idea go viral. Oh, really? Free will can be a pesky problem. If you put your campaign in a box, it stays in the box.

Aim

Ultimately, the reason why Rick Mercer’s plea worked was because of who was listening. Asking a bunch of politically ambivalent young people to vote is like asking Lindsay Lohan to stop drinking. But the young people who watch the Rick Mercer Report are doing so because they care about politics, at least enough to want to hear jokes about it. And they are the ones who can find others just like them.

What this points out is how important it is to match your audience with your message. You must ask yourself, who is my audience and what do they want? You can’t make an idea fly if the people you are pitching to don’t have wings.

We sometimes find that clients get confused between the “Follow Us” icons added to digital media and the “Share This” functionality that allows visitors to directly share web pages through social media. These 2 things are not interchangeable.

Follow Us

The sole purpose of Follow Us links is to build your social media following. The convention is to display the logos of all your social media networks on your website or blog in a consistent button format. The buttons are simple html links to your accounts, pages, and channels within the social media networks. This allows users to quickly add or follow you from their own social media accounts.

Don’t underestimate the importance of these buttons. Or, more accurately, don’t underestimate the extreme ineptitude of social media search functions. It is often much easier to visit an organization’s homepage and click on their Twitter link than it is to search and find them within Twitter itself. The same can be said of Facebook and YouTube. The easier you make it for people to follow you, the better.

Follow Us links should appear in a sensible intuitive place on a website. Ideally, in the same place on every page of the website. Our favourite spot is somewhere in a vertical navigation bar. Try not to bury it in the footer because it’s too far past the content for people to find. Putting it in the masthead runs the risk that visitors won’t notice it.

Don’t get into the minutiae of social media logos unless your audience is very active within the networks. If your audience isn’t on Digg, Reddit or Friend Feed, don’t overwhelm them with logos they may not even recognize.

Make sure you post regularly and make a solid effort to build up your following. Nothing is more counter productive than asking visitors to follow or fan you, only for them to learn you have a tiny following and you haven’t updated in months.

Share This

Share This, AddThis, TweetMeme, etc. are an entirely different ball game from Follow Us icons. They are not simple html, but require code (usually javascript) that performs a very specific function. They do not link to your social media accounts. Instead, they open up a social network, make sure the user is signed in, and “talk to” the social network code to create a custom post from the user’s account linking to a webpage specified by you. This is not easily done which is why one uses prepackaged plugins like Share This, AddThis or TweetMeme.

Share This functionality is wicked cool because it lets your supporters promote specific pages within your website or blog on your behalf. It’s complicated because it has to work with a 3rd party system it can’t really control (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and tell it what to do.

The Catch

It is not easy implementing Share This technology with anything other than a simple webpage. For example, including it in an email or a Flash page is a bitch. Why? Because they aren’t compatible with javascript. While it is possible to manually create a share this link by passing information to Facebook and Twitter through the html link, it’s capabilities are very limited. The cool part is it allows you to custom write tweets and Facebook posts on behalf of yourself. The drawback is it’s almost impossible to guarantee consistent results for a client. Think, “I tried to Facebook it from home and it looked all weird.”

This tech is being improved all the time to work within these limits. AddThis, for example, can be used with Flash. In my opinion, however, it’s not worth the hours of code tweaking and trouble shooting for more challenging media.

It’s my experience that if you don’t have someone who can quickly add the plug ins for you, straight social media promotion works just as well, especially since that’s where the majority of your share-inclined traffic will be coming from. Users are just as likely to retweet your bit.ly link right from Twitter as they are to use the Share This links on the page itself. The same goes for Facebook. If the content is cool, folks may be more inclined to just post it using the good ol’ cut and paste function than to use any fancy do it for me button. After all, the more things change, the more technology is a work in progress.

The Power and the Glory

Managed correctly, social media can significantly increase the traffic to your website. With a big enough following, anything you promote through your networks will get views – lots of views. So use that power wisely.

But before you try to promote something in social media, consider what people like to read and share, not just what you’d like to advertise. For example, we don’t put Share This links on our main website, only on our blog. Why? Because, really, does anyone care enough about our services to share them with their network? Hardly.

People like to share news, articles that teach them something, or opinion pieces that support their ideas. They likely won’t share a page about a product. But they might share a review about a product, or news about a new feature, etc.

Use social media for what it’s meant for and the rewards will be great: lots of your content being kicked around the social hemisphere. Bore people with your own agenda and people will think your Share This links are arrogant decorations.

Social networks are a funny place. See Angie’s top ten favourite things about Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. And while you’re there, get some valuable insights into viral marketing and using networks for social responsibility.

It has been 34 days since Google launched their social networking / messaging / real time update tool. Google buzz lets you “Start conversations about the things you find interesting”. This sounds awfully familiar. While twitter limits its users with 140 character messages, Buzz gives the user more features. But will it be a hit?

Updates are threaded in conversations so your conversations won’t get buried. You can attach pictures right into Buzz. It connects with other sites (Picasa, Flickr and Twitter). Finally, it lets you break the 140 character limit twitter imposes.

Unfortunately, it hasn’t seen the massive growth and widespread adoption Twitter has. Why does Google fail, even with the extra features? First of all, you need a Google Account, specifically Gmail, to enable Google Buzz. This acts as a barrier for users with other email accounts unwilling to make a switch just for Buzz. Secondly, Google isn’t known as a social media giant – it is synonymous with search.

Google’s Social Media Initiatives

Google has a history of trying to gain a foothold on social media while falling short. It sees that users flock to social media sites on the Internet. A recent report by PCmag cited Facebook as “the most popular online destination among United States users”. It wants in. It just doesn’t know how yet.

For example, prior to its purchase of YouTube, Google offered its video service as an alternative to YouTube. It currently offers Picasa as an alternative to Flickr; Blogspot as an alternative to the multitude of free blogging sites, Google Friend Connect as an alternative to – well, pretty much any social networking site.

With Google’s track record of attempts to penetrate the social media sphere, I think it’s safe to assume that Buzz isn’t a Twitter killer. It’s nice to have for existing Gmail users, but it probably won’t go farther than a commodity in a niche market.

YouTube is much more than a video site. Google enjoys 63% of the search engine market and of that, YouTube (owned by Google) accounts for 25%. With Yahoo at 11% and Bing at 9%, YouTube is the second largest search engine. It has over 300,000,000 user accounts and is the second largest social media website after Facebook.

YouTube’s search algorithm includes: title, description, tags, number of views, user rating and incoming links. All of these elements can be influenced by either the video producer or the viewer, and will determine the placement in YouTube and Google’s search listings. YouTube and Google absolutely influence each other. The higher your video ranks in Google, the more views it will receive, and the better it will rank on YouTube. The better your video ranks on YouTube, the higher it will rank in Google.

Optimization with Keywords and Meta Data

Google cannot read the content within videos, so you must include as much supportive content as possible. You describe the content by the use of incoming link text (if you link to your video from your website), title tags, description, and any words found on the pages surrounding it. The correct use of keywords is the most important influencer to getting more views on YouTube. Optimize the YouTube page of your video in the same way you would for a regular web page. Make sure that the keywords and text that you use to describe your YouTube videos match the keywords which you want to be ranked on in YouTube’s and Google’s search results.

The title of the video needs to describe the video in as few words as possible. For maximum SEO, place keywords to the left. Treat the tags on your video like you would the meta keywords on your html page. Make sure you repeat the keywords from your title in your description. Include a clickable URL to your website in the first line of the description tag. For each video you post, create unique titles, descriptions and tags, even with similar videos, as this will create “unique” content for the search engines to crawl.

Embed the Video on Your Website

Embed the videos that you host on YouTube onto your own website to optimize ranking. Google’s algorithms takes into account how many times a video has been viewed, and any views from your website will be added to the views on YouTube. Create a separate text-optimized page for each video on your site as the content provided by the text on those pages will help the search engines determine the information contained in your video. If possible, don’t embed multiple videos on one page. This is viewed as duplicate content and hurts the individual ranking of each video. Surround your videos with a descriptions and link to your YouTube page using your keywords.

To Google, the number of links describes popularity and link text describes what the video is really about. One way Google can measure the accuracy of your content claims is by evaluate the link text used to describe your video. Not only the number of links but the quality of theses links matter to Google. Websites with high page ranking that link to your video will positively impact your ranking.

Thumbnails, Branding and Call to Action

Make sure to consider the thumbnails of your video. YouTube pulls thumbnails from the 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 marks of your video. Having a strong, attractive thumbnail will motivate the user to choose your video over the others. Remember first impressions count. Open your video with a title, logo and URL. Also consider using constant in-video branding and a call to action throughout the entire video. Keep in mind that YouTube watermarks the bottom right corner with their logo don’t use that area for branding. Close with a slide 10 seconds long with the same information that you used at the opening of your video to  remind the viewer of your brand and URL.

Use Subtitles and Captioning on Videos

Captions and subtitles make videos accessible to a wider audience. It’s optional but strongly encouraged to make your videos available to as many people as possible. “Google believes that the world of information must be accessible to all,” said vice-president of Google, Vint Cerf, 66, who has used a hearing aid since age 13. Captions are in the same language as the video’s audio track, and subtitles are in a different language. Also utilize the annotation feature to highlight certain areas of your video.

Social Networking and Video

After your video has been posted, embedded, and optimized, you need to place it where people will see it, and hopefully circulate it through their networks. Encourage participation by enabling all the features on YouTube. Ratings and comments will help with search ranking so be sure to enable these features. Another way to increase traffic to your video is by using the share link underneath the video. You can post to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Digg, and StumbleUpon. You can also copy the link to share on IM or email.

If you have more than one video, create a channel. It is a public page on YouTube that you can brand with your colours and a background image containing your logo, URL and other information. Here you can create playlists, favourite videos, and subscribe to other channels. This will help to create a community around your videos, where people can subscribe, comment, and view your subscriptions and favourites.

As with any other social media on the web, you need to get involved by commenting on others videos, replying back to comments, and posting video replies to popular videos. If people like what you have to say they will follow your link back to your video channel.

YouTube has a enormous presence on the Internet and is very closely tied to Google. Make sure you put as much attention into optimizing your video content as you would any other online content. The proper optimization will make sure your video is accessible to the largest audience possible.