Entertaining or provocative videos can quickly become viral, being shared by tens or even hundreds of thousands of viewers, most of them connected through online social networks.
It is important to understand the nature of the environment in which video clips are most widely distributed and shared.
If you simply add a video clip to your site or blog, and to YouTube, you will be taking advantage of only a small fraction of the opportunity that exists.
In the same way that you optimize your web sites and blogs for the major search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN, you also have to optimize the presentation of your video clips in order to be found through searches within social network community sites.
This process is called Social Media Optimization, or SMO.
Social Media Optimization is the process by which you optimize your online presence to be more visible through searches within online communities and community web sites.
This is important when producing short videos, because it is within and across these networked community sites that video clips are most likely to be distributed and shared.
In other words, to maximize the chances of your video going viral, you have to optimize it for sharing across social network communities.
Once the post has been added by one person, it will be available to every other member of that community through the site's search function.
While some of these sites, like del.icious, Yahoo! and furl include categories that cover almost any topic and subject you can think of, other communities are more focused.
YouTube is clearly focused on short videos. In common with other social network sites, it has a number of features that enable members to vote for, rate, share and distribute the videos they like best.
In other words, social media search is driven not by algorithms, but by popular vote.
