MarketingSherpa, an online marketing information source, recently ran an article about how UNICEF has used social networking and video-sharing sites to gain supporters and inform people about its mission (article will be publicly available only until May 7th).

Here are some tips from the article.

Stephen Cassidy of UNICEF had already posted 2-3 minute videos on the UNICEF home page but wanted to spread them virally. Cassidy's team experimented with a MySpace page and then tried other video sharing sites...all for free. Within a year, the number of views on all those sites exceeded the views on the homepage, essentially doubling the agency's exposure.

Cassidy and his team installed videos on YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo! Video, AOL Video, blinkx, and Truveo. Crucial to the video success was using appropriate titles and tags. These allow web searchers to find the content on the major search engines and on the video sites.

Cassidy suggests considering carefully what terms a consumer might use to find your video and use those for the tags. The videos do no good if people cannot find them.

For UNICEF's MySpace page, the agency just jumped in without much of a plan. The idea was to learn and then use that knowledge later to upgrade the page. At first, the page was disorganized, but it drew 10,000 friends.

At that point the team followed a well-thought out process to rebuild the page. They analyzed the available sources to build and grow the page. These included wallpapers, banners, badges, icons, videos, podcasts and news.

In addition they used their relationships with the celebrities who work on behalf of UNICEF (Goodwill Ambassadors). Some of these people had MySpace pages and were willing to ask their friends to check out the UNICEF page or to place a UNICEF banner on their page.

An important part of the MySpace success is the constant updating done by UNICEF. They post to the blog frequently and upload new videos and podcasts each week.

They also created a clean, well organized page that represents the UNICEF brand successfully. Cassidy says that there are a lot of limitations to building a MySpace page...it is not like creating a Web page. You'll need a Web developer to help you get a really good looking page.

Cassidy points out that because the demographic of MySpace is young, his team worked very hard at not sounding like a "stuffy, institutional, old-fashioned organization preaching top down."

Within just four months after the MySpace page update, friends jumped 40% and the number of comments on the page increased by 20%.

It is too early to say whether UNICEF's activities on social and video-sharing sites will pay off in more donations, but, so far, it has been a public relations bonanza.