There's no doubt that video content gets crawled, indexed and ranked faster (and better) than any other content on the Net. So long as the author follows your 4 points above (and a few others) AND they optimize the video properly, the model works pretty much every time. The "secret sauce" is mostly LUCK, but every now and again someone will create a video that has a "viral" touch to it, and POW, your views go from OK to massive. If someone could find that viral formula, I'd certainly pay attention ;-)
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Its common knowledge that optimized video is far and away the most indexed and ranked web content. Knowing this, to me, it makes sense to showcase your company or product using video, so the consumer (and Google) can find you content and if your Video SEO is structured properly (robot.txt and the other techniques mentioned) the likelihood your video will get "picked up" by the major news wires, search engines would probably improve dramatically.

Besides your blog, where are you guys posting this new SMM sidget?