Viral Marketing Lessons from The Average American Male Book Phenomenom on YouTube

Last week, Jeffrey Trachtenberg wrote an interesting piece in The Wall Street Journal called "Steamy Book Gets Buzz from the Web." He describes how Harper Perennial , a paperback imprint of New Corp.'s HarperCollins publishing unit, spent $10,000 to produce three risque videos promoting Chad Kultgen's debut novel "The Average American Male" that were uploaded to YouTube (see examples  here).

As you can see in the above piece which aired a few days ago on CNBC's "On the Money," the campaign has been a huge success. The book's initial printing of 20,000 was quickly sold out, and there have been two more printings in the last two weeks totaling about 40,000 additional books. Many bookstores currently have the book on backorder.

There are some great viral marketing lessons from the success of this campaign:

1. If you have a book or product which has a story that can be told in a minute, put together a clever video and post it to YouTube which has the largest market share of video sharing websites.
2. Don't be afraid to use humor to highlight what makes your product unique.
3. Consider posting a new video once a week to keep people coming back for more and they'll forward new videos to friends.
4. Link to your viral videos from your book's website.
5. When you start getting many hits on your videos, notify journalists who report on marketing subjects via personalized email messages. Stories about viral marketing success are hot topics these days, and your press coverage will lead to more hits on your videos.
6. Make sure to include a call for action,  like the name of your book and where to buy it at the end of your video.