moar internets

Last July I created the video below. It is my Shepard character from Mass Effect riding in an elevator with Wrex and various other NPCs that are in your party. It is arguably my most popular video on YouTube, at least as far as comments and views go. That said, its no “Chocolate Rain”.

Recently, Mass Effect 2 was announced by Bioware. On 2/20/09 they released a teaser trailer. While ‘Wrex in an Elevator” recieved a decent amount of daily visitors, the average amount of unique visitors increased about 60-70%. 

Yes, there was simply more general interest in Mass Effect videos due to the announcement. There were smaller increases in my other Mass Effect videos as well after 2/20. What is of particular interest to me is that several other sites picked up my “Wrex in an Elevator” movie and embeded it to get more visits to their spammy gamer sites.

People want to know if their saved games will be used to determine the fates of their old crew, namely Wrex, Kaiden and Ashley. (Per Bioware: Don’t delete your ME 1 saved games if you still have them!) Because of the comments I get on the video contain some speculation about Mass Effect’s sequel, it ranks pretty well for queries such as “‘mass effect 2′ wrex kaiden ashley”. The embeded video ranks pretty well for the same terms:

So from an Online Marketing standpoint, this just goes to show how easy it is to use existing content on YouTube to give visibility to pages as well as why it is important to look at your analytics to see where your traffic is coming from and if anyone is using your content.

The new Obama administration has set up a transition information Web site in the same vein of the campaign Web site. There is a count down to the inauguration as well as you tube videos, jobs, agenda items, information about appointments and employment opportunities. I’m happy to see that the President-elect is continuing his commitment to social media. I was so impressed by the consistent message his campaign used between emails, text messages, content ads and the main Web site.

I was even more impressed that not more than 30min after his victory address, Obama sent out a last text message:

Final Text Message From the Obama Campaign