I'm still finding my style on this blog but I'd thought I'd post a few that were decent 'how to's' for campaigners in new media.

We're currently working on a grassroots campaign to challenge Jack Dromey for the Labour Party Treasurer position.

Our candidate has a good track record and needs support from the rank-and-file members, which is the constituency he seeks to represent. If we could get him to every CLP in the country where people could get a feel for what he's about, he'd walk it.

But he's got a day job and the organisational task of getting him to 600+ CLPs doesn't bear thinking about.

So he's engaging with the grassroots on blogs and making his case through the kind of magazines, such as Progress and Tribune, that are keenly read within the Labour family.

We had another wheeze though. What if we could try and get his personality across through short video clips, housed on YouTube. Not the same as meeting in the flesh but better than sending emails and newsletters. The videos have received 25,000 views in a very short space of time.

My friend and US campaign veteran, Jag Singh, masterminded this one and here were the tactics.

The "seeding" campaign began before we even started filming the interview. We first mapped out the niches relevant to our audience, and then made sure to address all the pertinent questions that people were asking every time we talked about the campaign.

We tried to ensure the candidate knew his lines, used camera positioning (eg, filmed from a lower position to lend "gravitas" to the subject, etc) and then edited it to cut out irrelevant bits and make it concise (cut it to about 30% length).

Viral seeding itself is tricky, and there are two bits:

The main strategy was this: create a spike in traffic to the video, so that it gets noticed and featured by the YouTube team, which means it gets promoted to the front page, which means organic traffic (people browsing the front page suddenly think that they have to watch this video). Here are some of the methods we employed:

Title Optimisation: When the video first went up, we used words like "Exclusive Interview" and "Explosive Interview" - then switched back after the initial spike to the more relevant "Mark McDonald for Labour Party Treasurer."

Keywords within the description: We made sure the YouTube page and all links to the page used the main keywords related to the campaign - type in "labour treasurer mark mcdonald" in Google and the YouTube video comes up within the top-two results.

Tags: When we first launched the campaign, we tagged it with every major keyword, including "Gordon Brown" "Labourvision" "Unions" - just so we could leech traffic from people searching the site.

Sharing: Get it on as many e-mail lists as possible, including ones unrelated to Labour politics. I managed to pass it on to a viral marketing list-serve. Shared it on Facebook, everywhere.

Picture/Thumbnail - we made sure thumbnail selected by YouTube (the middle point of the video) included the young female interviewer, to ensure that the video appealed to as wide an audience as possible (people get turned off by videos of men talking to the screen).