Local musician Dane Ferguson, a prolific singer/songwriter, posted a video of his rendition of American Idol contestant General Larry Platt's song "Pants on the Ground," and it was immediately a hit on YouTube; Dane posted the video on January 13 and as of this morning, in less than 4 days, it had almost 42,000 views with a 5-star rating and 242 comments.

Dane's experience should serve as a lesson for anyone looking to market themselves using social networking; for a long time I've been trying to get clients to understand that the secret to explosive social network marketing is to post something that has a good chance of going viral, and that's exactly what he did.  While he's a serious musician, he knew that no matter how great his original music is, in order to get a lot of people to find it quickly he needed a hook that our pop culture would latch onto and make it go viral - and when he saw  Platt's "Pants on the Ground" he knew he had it.  His one-minute video has resulted in tons of emails from new fans of his serious music. Take a look:

Now, to the next lesson:  the other thing I preach is that if you have a popular video on YouTube, you never know when it might show up on a TV news show.  Enter NBC Chicago's "Pants on the Ground" Tribute Retrospective, with 11 seconds of Dane's video smack in the middle of it:

I rest my case.  For those of you who thought I was crazy when I told you it could happen to you, get to work!  Though Dane was just fiddling around in his bedroom at home, he made a conscious strategic marketing decision to post this video; you don't need big budgets and slick cinematography to get attention - you just need to use your imagination and get off your duff!