Amazing Sand Art by Ilana Yahav

I appreciate art just as much as the next guy, but I’ve never had a compelling reason to share a video about art until I started seeing videos on Facebook of the incredibly talented Ilana Yahav. Her sand art is incredibly beautiful. Here’s one of the most amazing videos I’ve ever seen:

I see more and more of these sand art videos spreading across Facebook daily. The above video has been viewed almost 1.5 million times at the time of writing this post and I’m sure it’s provided her with some great publicity, but it does raise some questions. If you look at the tags of this video on YouTube.com you’ll notice that her name has not even been tagged correctly by the poster. Her first name and last name are mapped to two different tags. So you can’t even click on a tag of her name to see all of her videos. For many viewers this could be just another cool or even amazing video that doesn’t entice them to buy anything or cause them to follow any specific leads. In this case the site URL has been included in the video itself, but what about the millions of videos that don’t take advantage of this?

Luckily, YouTube’s ‘related videos’ feature does a good job of leading viewers to other videos by the same artist. I’ll end up watching at least another one of her videos, getting even more impressing with her work and so even if the site wasn’t included, I could still get there by doing a Google search of her name which would ultimately lead me to her site: http://www.sandfantasy.com/. Mission accomplished and once again a video that may not contain a link to a site or a product, is still capable of converting thousands and thousands of leads. Viral video marketing strikes again.

Fake viral video marketing Ronaldinho touch of gold

Every once in a while a video crops up that makes us sit back and wonder whether it’s real or fake. A classic example of this is the Ronaldinho soccer/football crossbar challenge. The video appears to be a cheap homemade video shot by someone who happened to be filming the star doing his magic during training. I won’t get into the exact detailsof the video but when you watch it you’ll understand what the dilemma is. The genius of it was that the creators who turned out later to be Nike did not want people to know whether it was real or fake. They wanted people to wonder and as a result to send it to their friends to ask for their opinion. Those friends would in turn send it on to their friends and so on and so on. This is the genius of fake viral video marketing.

Keep in mind that the Nike branding only came later on. The original video that circulated the web did not have the Nike branding and looked exactly like any other amateur video.

Here’s the YouTube video entitled Ronaldinho Touch of Gold: