We just finished the first of what I’m sure will be many Junior Achievement Job Shadows at Spunlogic and we had such a great time! We had around 20 kids from a local high school come and spend a day with us to learn about working at an interactive agency. I can assure you that we got more out of it than they did! I certainly recommend it to any company that is interested in giving a little back to the community and helping and inspiring young minds.

I just came across an article by the Associated Press entitled, “The keys to going viral on YouTube“. The article, which I think is actually pretty weak, lists several things to make your video go viral:

- Infuse yourself into the community by posting video responses and comments within YouTube - this is a pretty good tip, you can’t just build it and hope they come anymore

- Try to get featured on the YouTube homepage…uh, yeah. That’s like telling an ugly person the best way to get a date is to be on the homepage of Match.com. A) If you’re ugly you’re not getting on the homepage and b) if you do get on the homepage, no one is going to click on you anyway. My apologies to ugly people but you guys have your own ugly person website, so I’m guessing you’re cool with it.

- The more people that view your video, the more people that will view your video…rriiiighhhttt

- Have an attractive female in the video…hard to argue this one

Ok, so those are pretty weak. But why do we keep missing the point with this - make the content worth viewing! It’s no wonder marketers get a lot of grief when entering in to social marketing websites. They are more focused on ways to trick consumers than they are on producing good content. So I say, long live the dancing dude and the crazy dog; keep ‘em coming.

I came across a site that I thought was really interesting called Jumpcut, which is a site that allows you to upload your own movie clips much like YouTube. In addition the site allows you to upload sound tracks and images in order to edit/cut a movie. It’s essentially an online video editing suite. The really cool thing is that you can grab other movie clips that have been shared by users, allowing you to combine them or remix them to make your own version. And just like YouTube, you can share your newly created video content with friends, the rest of the community, etc.

Jumpcut is owned by Yahoo and I’d imagine it’s their competition to Google-owned YouTube. I was actually pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to use the site, edit content, and my favorite feature: using other peoples’ video content to create my own versions. A client of mine actually steered me to the site after mentioning a Doritos Super Bowl contest he saw on the site. The contest asks people to create their own video using Jumpcut to edit the movie, grab shared clips and upload original content. The movies submitted by the community were actually really cool and more importantly novice users with little knowledge of video editing could participate. Although YouTube is the clear leader in user-generated video content, I thought Jumpcut had a really cool collaborative spin to it, and more importantly allowed anyone to participate regardless of their skill set or knowledge and you don’t need to have any original content to use the site.