Much of the attention to date for online marketing video has been around single viral videos that, if the stars are in alignment, spike a few weeks after release with hundreds of thousands of views and then die a relatively quick death.  Reach is good – if your viral video takes off, but that’s no way build or sustain a market.

The ‘Will-it-blend’ series by Blentec was a great example of a well executed series of viral videos that helped sell a lot of Blentec blenders. Had Blentec stopped at the first video they would never have achieved the same level of success.  Which brings us to the Sons of Maxwell…

Dave Carroll – the lead signer for the Canadian band “Sons of Maxwell” promised that he would create three separate music videos to express his anger over the mistreatment he received after United Airlines wrecked one of his guitars and then did not take responsibility for their actions. The first video has received over 5 million views on YouTube alone. United is still reeling from that musical beat-down.

While the second video (above) will never get close to doing the numbers the first video did, it was very smart to create a series of videos to keep the momentum going and to keep his newly acquired fan-base in touch with the band. The second video is rather catchy and it’s fun to watch. The video also serves to showcase the musical range of the band which could help broaden their longer term fan-base.  Video three, when released will undoubtedly be different again, and will further reinforce the name and music of the Sons of Maxwell band.

Frequency of message – always important to the success of broadcast marketing, will start to play a larger role in online video marketing.

A week ago I posted about Dave Carroll and his band ‘Sons of Maxwell’ getting the run around from United Airlines after the negligent mishanding of his Taylor guitar. Fed up and frustrated with United’s lack of interest  Dave decided to punish the Airline the best way he knew how – he wrote a song about the experience. (Two more songs are in the works…)

At the time of posting the video had an impressive 200,000 hits on YouTube. That was then. A week later the video has been viewed more than 3,000,000 times and the blogosphere is alight with the story. Must be tough sledding in the United PR department.

Sensing an opportunity Taylor Guitars has jumped into the video fray and published (responded with) their own ‘show of support’ video. It’s difficult to estimate but you have to guess the PR value for ‘Sons of Maxwell’ is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and Taylor guitar has probably never been this famous. Like all things viral this will quickly blow over but the entire incident will have left an invigorated Canadian country band, a rejuvenated guitar manufacturer and a discombobulated airline in its wake.