(This wasn’t the first Dallas Cowboys Football-related spectacle I’ve covered – I previously photographed the tragedy of the collapse of the Dallas Cowboys practice field roof near where I live.)

My video’s quality actually wasn’t all that hot, I must admit. The demolition was to occur a little after daybreak, at near 7:00 a.m., and it was cloudy. I did try to get a vantage point as close as possible where there was very little jockeying for position from the crowd of thousands who showed to witness the event. I also planned ahead sufficiently to prepare by bringing a folding chair, allowing me to stand above the crowd around me.

But, I was unsure how long the demolition would take – things like this can be unpredictable. So, I set my camera (a Nikon Coolpix S51 that I’ve used all the way around the world) to a little lower resolution, “small size 320″, instead of higher resolution. This gave me more minutes of film time, and allowed me room to shoot some photos as well.

Even considering that my video was not of the highest quality of those posted for the demolition, and even though some others had better vantage points, my video became one of the top two most popular posted on YouTube, ranking in searches there as well as within Google, under Universal Search. So, how did I accomplish it in one day flat?

It starts with the title – I predicted that people would search for both “Texas Stadium Implosion” as well as “Texas Stadium Demolition” to find this content. So, I included BOTH of those terms in the title. I also wanted to include “Dallas Cowboys” in it, and try to describe it compellingly to increase clickthroughs, so I mentioned “Epic”. Here’s the title I engineered to attempt to target many of the most popular search query combinations people might use in trying to find videos of the explosion:

“Texas Stadium Demolition – The Epic Dallas Cowboys’ Texas Stadium Implosion!”

Second, I gave the video a keyword-rich description which further reinforced each of the main keyword phrases I was targeting. I custom-wrote the description, mentioning a small amount of the facts outlined in the Wikipedia article for the Texas Stadium.

One subtlety of the description was my inclusion of a link over to my personal blog, where I’d written a matching blog post about the experience, “Texas Stadium Implosion – Huge Demolition Event“. This allowed people who came across the video to read up my longer description of the whole deal.

In YouTube, I did a few other things as well. I specified which of the three video stills would be used as the thumbnail preview for the vid when it appears in search results (oh, how I wish they’d allow more choices or would allow one to upload a custom image for that).

I also set loosest requirements for user interactions with the video page, allowing people to rapidly interact with the page with instant gratification. Allowing instant gratification in this manner can encourage more and faster user-interactions with the page such as comments, video responses, voting on comments, ratings, embedding and syndication. While setting loose requirements often makes major corporations very nervous, my settings show how enabling rapid interactions can push the success of a video, since many of these YouTube components are signals for user-interest and therefore rankings. Having these interactions appear rapidly is more vital under Google’s RealTime Search algorithms.

Finally, I also set the Date to display “Today”, and associated the video with the map location of the Texas Stadium in Irving, allowing the vid to essentially be geocoded to appear in local search results in Google Maps.

Outside of YouTube, I twittered about the Texas Stadium implosion frequently, and also posted my still photos of it on Flickr at “Texas Stadium Implosion“.

In my blog post about the demolition, I embedded the video. I also linked to the video from the Flickr images and from my Twitter updates. I later blogged again from another blog, posting “Texas Stadium Demolition Case Study – YouTube Still Tops For Video Promotion” on Natural Search Blog.

What were the results? Well, the video has had over 55,000 views yesterday, and over a hundred comments!

My Texas Stadium video appears prominently in various related Google Search results:

It also appears prominently within various YouTube search results, allowing people seeking it to find it easily and interact with it further:

Google automatically is generating a Google Trends graph now, highlighting how “Texas Stadium implosion video” is now one of the top-five trending phrases today:

As further evidence that Google has found the terms to be important, Google’s Real-Time Search Results interface has automatically kicked in, scrolling away Twitter and blog mentions of the event:

All this to show that achieving top rankings in YouTube and Google search results for video search is not rocket science! There are a few other subtle things that I did in performing the video optimizations, but I’ve outlined many of the most-impactful ones in this article.

To get Google Real-Time Search to sing in harmony with keyword search and YouTube search, it’s vital to post content as rapidly as possible as the related search terms first begin trending. It’s also vital to perform solid video SEO, and to encourage rapid/frequent user-generated content on the video’s main page in YouTube.

I know that many of you reading this who are building video optimization tactics for promoting major corporation websites are probably concerned about whether you are too vulnerable to malicious comments on your video pages – and this is a valid concern! If you read the comments on my video page, you’ll see that people have used foul language, insulted one another, gotten into arguments, posted conspiracy theories, etc.

Cool thing is, YouTube provides robust tools for controlling your video pages. You can delete these comments and also go back to change the setting to require that all comments and “video responses” get moderated and approved by you prior to publishing. So, for corporate work, I’d suggest initially allowing the loose interaction rules until your video really goes hot, then circle back around to delete comments you don’t want to appear and tighten the posting to enable your moderation. In this way, you can achieve popular content, then after your video is established, sanitize any content you dislike and lock it down to keep further from appearing. So, your risk of negativity is very temporary.

Using an interlocking strategy of social media, realtime search tactics, and solid video SEO will allow you to maximize the success of your video content, giving you a significant weapon to use in your online marketing arsenal.

From a marketing standpoint, this poses a significant problem. Marketers desire to promote via as many channels as possible in order to target demographic groups loyal to different ones. As you increase the number of unique social media channels, however, it becomes more labor-intensive, and the Law of Diminishing Returns kicks in at some point. For a small business, the correspondingly lower return on investment hits pretty quickly.

Enter a whiz-bang new service that addresses this need: dlvr.it, currently in beta, brought to us by the people who made Pheedo.

Dlvr.it enables you to take one or more RSS feed sources, and then set them to automatically deliver to some of the most common social media sites out there: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Identi.ca.

I’ve tried out a few different services for accomplishing this sort of delivery before, including Pingdom and Twitterfeed, but I find dlvr.it to be superior. For example, Twitterfeed has been very klunky to try to configure, and I’ve found to be very, very slow at sending updates out. By contrast, dlvr.it provides a number of fine-tuning settings to allow you to specify frequency of checking feeds for updates, and when set at the most-frequent update checks it will publish status updates within minutes of a feed.

The Filters settings are even better – allowing you to make the service distribute posts according to criteria such as if a feed update uses a certain Category or if it contains a certain keyword sequence within the text or title, etc. So, for instance, I contribute to a few different group blogs, such as SEM Clubhouse, and for my Facebook and LinkedIn updates I might only wish to have the blog posts distributed which I’ve personally written. So, I could set a Filter that checks to see if the SEMClubhouse RSS feed update contains the “by Chris Silver Smith” attribution within the post and only deliver if the character string is present.

Now, dlvr.it has only recently been launched into beta service, so it will be interesting to see if it starts having any sorts of lagtime issues as I’ve seen with other services that have been in production for longer, and likely have more users to excuse what may be their growing pains. Also, it’ll be great to see if dlvr.it begins to broaden out to allow more social media sites for you to integrate your feeds into.

But, it seems clear that dlvr.it may be the current best-in-class for social media syndication services, and will be an invaluable tool for marketers to use for social media optimization.

Write once, and automatically deliver many!

Once a business proprietor notices this, they may think to themselves, “Aha! Easy as pie! I know Wikipedia allows anyone to edit articles and add articles about any and everything, so I’ll have my clever nephew who does the internets add an article about my business!” Unfortunately, it’s not this simple.

The ease with which Wikipedia allows community user edits has been a prime area for criticism of the service over the years, and Wikipedia has responded by tightening review of whether subjects are notable enough to merit their own articles, and dedicated Wikipedia devotees try to scrutinize all edits to insure that they’re factual, backed up by respectable references, and worthy of mention. So, addition of articles in a willy-nilly fashion without good understanding of the service’s rules and practices will almost certainly lead to deletion of the content added. It may not happen immediately, but it almost certainly will happen at some point.

The brutal truth is that most businesses simply are not notable enough to merit having a Wikipedia article dedicated to them. There is some sense of the arbitrary about what characteristics are required to meet notability guidelines, because there is some element of subjectivity about it. Essentially, a subject likely needs to be historically significant, culturally significant, or be widely known. A highly significant, publicly-traded company such as Google would meet the requirements, while a small clock repair shop in Anytown likely will not.

Small stores can make the cut, such as the Gotham Book Mart, for which I researched and authored the Wikipedia article a couple of years back. But, few businesses have had as many newspaper articles about them, mentioned in books as much, or had as many associations with notable individuals.

The iconic "Wise Men Fish Here" sign which hung above the door of the famous Gotham Book Mart for decades.

So, what’s to be done if you’re a small business looking to increase your promotional game? Is Wikipedia completely off-limits to you?

No! There are a number of acceptable ways by which one may integrate with Wikipedia in valid, non-spammy ways, and I’ll cover two of the easiest here. These two methods are primarily for those small businesses which do not merit articles dedicated to them in Wikipedia.

Method 1: Set up your own User page and begin authoring and editing Wikipedia articles.

The best way to understand Wikipedia is to begin participating. Here’s an article on how to start. You may validly write up a User page with links to your own sites, and the more you help out with Wikipedia articles, the more important your User page becomes. As it becomes important, your business site may benefit.

Now, User pages and other pages in Wikipedia automatically nofollow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow external links as they are added, meaning that they are flagged for search engines as not being endorsed by Wikipedia. “Nofollowing” a link was intended to halt it from passing PageRank or ranking value in search engines, and was introduced to help fight spam in sites where users are allowed to add links. There’s a debate among marketing circles as to whether Google chooses to count Wikipedia’s external links in ranking algorithms or not. My suspicion is that as other spam-fighting methods have improved in Wikipedia, the links which have been added and have sustained over time likely do have some rank value — and are therefore likely used by Google for ranking purposes.

The User pages of those who add a lot of value to Wikipedia gain PageRank themselves, and, even if they do not pass PageRank, the links do pass traffic which can indirectly help increase a site’s rankings in other ways. (For instance, see MONGO’s User page, which has developed a Google Toolbar PageRank of 4 or Durova’s which has a 6.)

If you’re setting up your User page in part to promote your business, I suggest that you consider naming it beneficially with your business name, or a category/keyword name that refers to your type of business. Describe your business briefly. Link to relevant articles about your city or neighborhood. Link to your company with descriptive link text. And, to provide a chance of enabling this to eventually help your listing in Google Maps, include a Geobox in the profile (this addes geocoordinates to the page, a key element that Google looks for when deciding if a page is about a location).

If you’re a newbie at Wikipedia, I strongly suggest you proceed slowly and learn the environment. To get a good grasp of what people edit on pages, check out the History tab on a number of articles and click to compare revisions. This shows how people make changes, what they change, and many ideally provide a super-brief snippet of text to state what they’ve altered.

It’s very easy to find areas where you can add value: read articles of subjects you’re familiar with and interested-in, and you’ll likely find text needing grammatical correction, badly phrased sentences needing clearer writing, factual errors, and articles needing some additional vital pieces of information. Be sure to find and add credible references if adding or altering facts — you should ideally back up all facts with a reference source, just as if you were writing research papers for college.

Method 2: Donate photos of local scenes to Wikimedia Commons for use in Wikipedia articles.

I’ve written before about how it can be beneficial to employ loose licensing for images so that others may be incented to use them and link back to your site, and this is a variation on that theme (see: Why Free Photos Equal Good SEO).

For instance, the photographer who donated this pic of the famous Chrysler Building, David Shankbone, included URLs on the image’s information page which link to his site.

For another example, check out the page for the photo I donated for the Gotham Book Mart of the “Wise Men Fish Here” sign.

Is this allowed? Absolutely. Read Wikipedian Durova’s article on how adding images to Wikipedia is acceptable. Wikipedia desires to have good quality photos donated for use so that they may be used to illustrate articles. This is an area where helping the community can be mutually beneficial for everyone.

This tactic is actually pretty powerful, because releasing images into Wikimedia in return for attribution (a citation when anyone uses your photo, with a link back to you) enables you to achieve a lot of links from other sites as well, depending upon the popularity of and usefulness of your photo and its subject matter.

To figure out what photos to add, I suggest reviewing the Wikipedia articles of famous places in your area, and identifying ones which do not have pics. Then take a Saturday morning with good weather and sunlight, and snap photos to donate. You can also look at Wikipedia’s page for Articles needing images, but many of these may be more specific subjects for which you may not be able to provide photos.

Naturally, there are a number of “don’ts” when adding content to Wikipedia. I won’t expand on all those here, but they probably mostly boil down to “don’t be spammy” and “be polite”. I suggest reading up on Wikipedia Etiquette if you’re just getting started. Wikipedia desires content which is informative, factual, and neutrally presented.

There are a number of more advanced means of optimizing for Google Maps and local search via Wikipedia, for those who are more experienced with the service. I’ll likely be going into more of these tactics in upcoming articles at Search Engine Land and in presentations I make at upcoming conferences. So, stay tuned for more!

I recently experimented with adding some special characters to one of my Tweets, and it resulted in quite a number of Re-Tweets as well as clickthroughs. Although it involved an already highly-popular topic (Star Wars), I think the Tweet grabbed more people’s notice because the stars I added to it allowed it to stand out from the crowd more as people scanned the stream of Tweets running through their Twitter accounts:

Special Characters are not hard to add to Tweets, if you’re posting from online. They can be trickier if you’re attempting to Tweet via your wireless devices, since those do not all support extended character sets.

Here’s the classic “Lucky Charms” known to morning cereal afficianados — hearts, moons, stars, and clovers: ♥ ☾ ★ ♣

One of the most frequently used symbols in Tweets is a music notes symbol, when individuals Tweet the current song they’re listening to:

For those using Blip.fm, it’s very easy to Tweet out little messages indicating what you’re listening to, if you tie the services together, and Blip appears to automatically tack on the music notes symbol.

Special characters are handled in HTML and other markup languages via “entity reference” codes or “character references”, of course, and are nothing new. You may be able to simply copy and paste a special character that you want to use, but I’ve also found that you may need to actually paste in the special character code in order to get the symbol to appear.

Some special characters are really too intricate to adequately convey, unfortunately.

I’ve made a helpful list of special character entity codes which you can easily copy-and-paste into your Tweets. These are not all special characters, since I left out the more boring special punctuation characters, foreign language letters and symbols which I think are unlikely to communicate in the tiny letter size employed by Twitter:

♠ ♠ (solid spade)
♤ ♤ (open spade)
♣ ♣ (solid club / shamrock / clover)
♧ ♧ (open club / shamrock / clover)
♦ ♦ (solid diamond)
◊ ◊ (open diamond / lozenge)
♥ ♥ (solid heart)
❤ ❤ (heavy solid heart)
❥ ❥ (heavy rotated solid heart)
♡ ♡ (open heart)
☻ ☻ (solid happy face)
☺ ☺ (open happy face)
☹ ☹ (open frowny face)
₪ ₪ (arabesque)
♀ ♀ (female symbol)
♂ ♂ (male symbol)
↑ ↑ (up arrow)
↓ ↓ (down arrow)
→ → (right arrow)
← ← (left arrow)
↔ ↔ (right & left arrow)
⇑ ⇑ (double up arrow)
⇓ ⇓ (double down arrow)
⇐ ⇐ (double left arrow)
⇒ ⇒ (double right arrow)
⇔ ⇔ (double right & left arrow)
Δ Δ (triangle / delta)
£ £ (pounds)
¢ ¢ (cents)
€ € (Euros)
¥ ¥ (Yen)
♕ ♕ (White Queen - crown)
♔ ♔ (White King - crown)
♘ ♘ (White Knight - horse)
♚ ♚ (Black King - crown)
♛ ♛ (Black Queen - crown
♞ ♞ (Black Knight - horse)
© © (copyright)
® ® (registered trademark)
™ ™ (trademark)
• • (bullet / solid circle)
∅ ∅ (zero with slash thru)
¿ ¿ (upside down question mark)
‹ ‹ (less-than)
› › (greater-than)
« « (double less-than, quote)
» » (double greater-than, quote)
№ № (Number, numero symbol - "No.")
★ ★ (solid star)
☆ ☆ (open star)
✪ ✪ (circled white star)
✹ ✹ (12 pointed black star)
† † (cross or dagger)
‡ ‡ (double cross)
☠ ☠ (skull & crossbones/ pirates/ Jolly Rodger/ poison symbol)
☽ ☽ (waxing crescent moon)
☾ ☾ (waning crescent moon)
☪ ☪ (Islam - crescent moon & star)
☭ ☭ (Communist - hammer & sickle)
❦ ❦ ( upright - floral heart / hedera / ivy leaf)
❧ ❧ ( sideways,rotated - floral heart / hedera / ivy leaf)
♩ ♩ (single music note - quarter note)
♪ ♪ (single music note - eighth note)
♫ ♫ (double music note - single bar note)
♬ ♬ (double music note - double bar note)
✡ ✡ (Star of David)
☯ ☯ (Yin/Yang)
☮ ☮ (Peace Sign)
☸ ☸ (Dharma wheel, sailing wheel)
¤ ¤ (currency or sun)
☀ ☀ (sunshine - sun)
⊕ ⊕ (circled plus or cross in a circle)
⊗ ⊗ (circled times or exxed circle)
℞ ℞ (RX - prescription symbol)
☁ ☁ (cloud - cloudy)
☂ ☂ (umbrella - rain)
☄ ☄ (comet)
☎ ☎ (solid phone)
☏ ☏ (open phone)
☑ ☑ (check box)
☒ ☒ (exxed box)
☚ ☚ (left-pointing finger)
☛ ☛ (right-pointing finger)
☝ ☝ (up pointing finger)
☞ ☞ (down pointing finger)
☠ ☠ (skull & crossbones)
☥ ☥ (Ankh)
☢ ☢ (radioactive)
☣ ☣ (biohazard)
✓ ✓ (check mark)
✝ ✝ (Latin Roman Cross)
✞ ✞ (Latin Cross 3d shadow)

It appears that the best way to send the special characters may be by simply copying the icon you wish to use and then pasting it into a Tweet. I experimented with copying the character code and with copying the displayed character itself, and both seem to work, though.

Just a note or two of caution: I believe special graphic characters such as these ought to be used to spice up posts occasionally, and should be avoided as a “main ingredient”. Use them sparingly, like exclamation points. If over-used, your audience will get graphic icon fatigue and their familiarity will lessen their ability to grab attention.

Again, these special characters won’t work on all devices! I can see the characters online through my PC browser, but not through my PDA. Via SMS, the character doesn’t go through at all, while surrounding text displays as normal. Via web browser on my PDA, there is just an unknown generic “block” character that appears in place of the special character. So, choose carefully if you wish to use these!

So, I’d also like to hear what you think about this. Have you used such characters to spice up your Tweets? If so, how effective do you think they are? Do they increase CTR when links are included?

Let us know what you think in the comments below.

The same can be said of any type of content you are producing for consumption on the internet. In the end it is the audience who is going to decide the value. While you are thinking these are great tips on how to change a light bulb and that’s the value, the audience perceives something else as more valuable about your content. It could be that the tips save them valuable time and money, something you likely hadn’t considered. While you might be thinking certain points of a video you produced about how your product works is the value, the audience viewing it find more value in how it saved them a ton of time figuring out how to integrate your product in with something they are already using, making both products exceptionally useful to them.

Once your audience finds value in the content you are providing, when they truly believe this content is worth its weight in gold, that’s when it has the potential to spread like wildfire. It may not hit the front page of Digg, but if one loyal audience member finds true value in your content they are going to spread it out to their friends by sharing their experience with it. People love to relate the experiences and those experiences, if valuable, are powerful marketing agents all on their own. The notion of “look what it did for my friend Suzie” after Suzie has explained the value she found is a very persuasive tool, and then all of Suzie’s friends relate it to their friends. If these friends are in social networks like Facebook, MySpace, or an Ning network out there, the potential for the content going from reaching just a few people to instead touching thousands is great.

This is why marketers both online and offline need to stop thinking of themselves as the “be all end all” decider of what is of value in marketing messages. Instead of consistently trying to push messages on an audience or customer base, they need to start sitting back and listening to the current conversations going on about what they are marketing and how those current messages are being received and interpreted. By listening to the conversations marketers can learn a lot more about their demographics and how they think, instead of just assuming because they are a certain age bracket and sex or race they act a certain way. Things change in the real world and the internet and the social media platforms that have been created offer marketers access to a huge , unself-conscious and very brutally honest, focus group.

Let’s face it the way traditional marketing, that of continually pushing the message that’s been carefully crafted, has changed. Audiences become banner blind, they fast forward through commercials on their Tivos, they channel hop on the radio because they do not find these messages or this type of content of any value. Marketers in today’s world of instant soapboxes (blogs) and the world’s fastest telephone chain (Twitter, Facebook & even email) have to now understand what the customers are deeming as value and create content focused on that value, not the values they crafted in a sterile office space to make CEO’s and senior management feel better about themselves. Whether companies like it or not, customers are now defining a lot of what a brand, product or service means.