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

Holy Memes Batman, Its Weezer.

I didn’t think it was possible to have moar internets and then Weezer came along and gave me a crap ton of internets. “Pork and Beans” is rockin’.

But besides just being a rocking Old-School-like Weezer jam, it is quite possibly one of the most brilliant viral marketing campaigns for a new album — ever. Check out the video:

So just about just every popular internet trend in the last few years featured here. Most notably, Weezer has gone out and picked up some of the most picked on people to feature. Chris Crocker (of LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE! fame) gets a hug from River. Ms. South Carolina, Caitlin Upton gets to blend some maps (maybe if the kids didn’t blend their maps, they would know where the US is). The Afro Ninja returns and kicks some ass. Tay Zonday’s leans away from the mic to breathe. The Numa Numa guy dances, immortalized. So many more… it’s like someone dumped ebaums or /b/ onto weezer and God touched it and it was good.

Shit’s brilliant. Not only is this going to be one of those videos that people will watch 20 years from now and get all nostalgic for YouTube in its infancy (and the days before net neutrality or w/e regulation they legislate, amirite?).

But right now, today, it’s viral as hell. 4 million views and counting in 5 days? This is how you do it, my viral marketing friends.