B-Boy Solid and Jason Tom rehearse for a Chop Chop Media video.

College is for Everybody features Jason Tom, Pua Akana, KC Lyn, B-Boy Solid, Richard Mizusawa and Adrienne Ramos.

Prepare for College features Leslie Au, KC Lyn, B-Boy Solid, Richard Mizusawa, Adrienne Ramos and Dwayne Tegman.

Pay for College features Brett Kimura, KC Lyn, B-Boy Solid, Richard Mizusawa, Adrienne Ramos and Dwayne Tegman.

Essentially, Stan drew and animated the entire web video by hand…then he created a :30 spot on the same theme. The client is the University of Hawaii, for their 15 to Finish campaign, urging incoming college students to take 15 credits per semester and finish college on time. Done under the auspices of his post-production and graphics company GRAVITY, Stan created a web video and a :30 spot with a kinetic typography look that wowed his clients.

I just thought I’d take the opportunity to shine a light on Stan and what a good job he did. Enjoy…

One of our videos surpassed 10,000 views on YouTube.

It’s not a multi-million view viral video with kittens or babies…but for us, this is our little accidental viral video: an entertaining look at the Honolulu food truck scene and the food bloggers who cover the monthly Eat the Street event.

I say accidental because, other than posting it on our YouTube site, and adding a few good tags and searchable titles and description, we did nothing to promote this video.  As a matter of fact, when we first blogged it, we linked to the Hawaiian Airlines YouTube Channel, because they were the client.

But all those tags and all that searchable text worked for us, because our little video began to come up in other people’s searches as a related video.  And then Food Network’s Cooking Channel launched a show with a very similar title.  And the street food/food truck phenomenon really took off across the country.

Without us doing a thing, somewhere between 20- 50 folks a day continue viewing our video.

So what’s the lesson?

Always, always, always maximize the amount of searchable descriptive words you can add when posting a video on YouTube.

Remember that YouTube is owned by Google…if YouTube was a search engine, it would be number two in numbers of searches only to Google.  When people search on YouTube, they are searching for videos.  But video isn’t searchable…words are.  So here’s a few suggestions on how to add text that will ensure you get the most possible views:

1.  Create a title that includes as many descriptive words as you can that are words that people might type into a search engine to find your video.  Keep your titles around 66 characters or less, since Google cuts off longer titles.  Adding the word “video” to your title will make it come up more often in searches where people are specifically looking for a video.

2.  Begin your description with a URL to your website and make it a clickable link, including the http://.  Might as well steer some traffic to your home page, right?

3. Your description can be super long, so you might as well add as long a description as possible, including the names of all the people featured, their company names, the names of the location…up to 500 characters.  In this case, more words are better…the better to find your video in a search.  My title and description include the words “food trucks” and “Eat the Street.”  My theory is that this video is coming up all the time in searches for the Cooking Channel show “Eat Street” (happy coincidence) and in searches for “food trucks” and “street food.”

4.  Finally, be sure to maximize the number of tags, and be as specific as possible.  Think about what you might type into a search engine if you were looking for the information in your video, and use that as a tag.  If I were to tag this video today, knowing what I know now, I would tag it with these words:  food trucks, street food, “Eat the Street,” Hawaii, Twitter, social media, Facebook, and then as many names as I could fit of the more popular food trucks and food bloggers featured.

Incidentally, on the Hawaiian Airlines YouTube channel, this exact same video has only 1,048 hits.  They added minimal tags and text when they posted it.

What’s your most viral video?  What’s the secret to your success?

Featuring Kenneth Zeri & Tammi Barboza – Hospice Hawaii, Larry Heim – HONBLUE, Brett Seitman – It’s All About Kids, Rick Nakashima – Ruby Tuesday Hawaii, and Nelson Befitel, Ben Ancheta, Larry Hubbell – ProService Hawaii.

Merry Merry Chop Chop!

This is a posting of gratitude…a year ago, our company, Chop Chop Media, wasn’t even an idea yet. We were plugging along, underemployed, in an industry that felt like a sinking ship. Thirty years of hard work and honing our skills and many days we sat spinning our wheels.

Then a conversation led to a spark. That spark let to movement. That movement led to a big idea. That big idea filled our hearts with excitement. Chop Chop Media was born.

We came up with the concept for our new company in February. Spent March and April building out a mini-business plan, teaching ourselves WordPress and building a website, designing a logo and a look, getting legal. We decided that our greatest goal was to make the day-to-day of our work the most fun it could possibly be, and to seek collaborations with likeminded folks. We wanted to have fun. And we wanted to be social.

Social media was the “something new” that we were adding to the mix of our professional lives. Whatever work we did, we were going to do it in public, on the web, in front of everybody, and hoped that it would go viral! We schooled ourselves and got ready to take our use of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other online tools to a higher level. We were going pro.

In May, we soft-launched the company by rolling out our website and began to tweet as @chopchopmedia. We created a Facebook page, a LinkedIn company page…we each ramped up our online social skills to new heights. The storm of activity that followed was more than we could possibly have imagined. Folks loved the name, the idea, the look, THE VIDEOS. Folks we hadn’t heard from in years came out of the woodwork and “liked” our videos. Strangers became our fans and began following our exploits. Many of these strangers became friends and colleagues. Some of them became clients.

The phone started ringing.

Chop Chop Media was booked. Our YouTube Channel was filling up with beautiful videos we are super proud of. And not only were we booking up production and editing dates for Chop Chop Media, but each of our other companies, Gravity and Shirley Thompson Editorial, also started getting more interest and more calls. By Labor Day, we were so busy, we could have cloned ourselves and worked twice as much. We can’t believe how warm and wonderful the reception has been for our new approach to making video for the web and for collaborating with wonderful people. And for this we are grateful, grateful, grateful. 2011 has been a ton of fun…we love our clients (many of whom are now good friends) and we love spending our days figuring out new and better ways that we can serve them to help their businesses grow.

We have to salute especially the terrific folks we have met along the way, mostly social entrepreneurs who believe in making the world a better place through the ways they do business. It is such a pleasure and a joy to work with all of them. And we also LOVE the folks we have met through the Social Media Club of Hawaii. We are just crazy about this group: such positive, upbeat people who are super excited to learn new things and share that knowledge for the betterment of all.

We don’t know what 2012 will bring, but we do know that we are as excited as we can be to keep expanding our knowledge and learning new ways to use the web to communicate, collaborate and create. If you want to make video and want to have a blast doing it, give us a call. We are super stoked about what we do, and we are excited for the next challenge.

Thank you. Mahalo nui loa. We wish all of you the very happiest holidays and a shining, positive new year.

Featuring Prudential Locations realtors: Donna Yamagishi, Dancetta Feary, Malia Siu, Wanda Ortiz-Thayne, Cy Carnate; Prudential Locations Partner & Realtor James Chan; and Executive Vice President of Sales for Prudential Locations Scott Higashi.