One year ago, Dave Cleaver, owner of Inspired Bicycles, a very small specialist bike frame manufacturer in Hull, UK uploaded a promotional video showing one of his sponsored riders turning street trial tricks in Edinburgh.

Forty eight hours later and the video had surpassed one million views on YouTube and the Danny MacAskill phenomenon was launched. Today, the video has been viewed more than 16 million times and Danny, an unassuming young Scot, has a sponsorship deal with Red Bull and has been feted by media all over the world.

“I knew the video was special because after seeing it the first time I had a lump in my throat,” remembers Cleaver. Still, as the 27 year-old two wheel entrepreneur explains neither he, MacAskill nor the director of the video, Dave Sowerby, a friend of Danny’s, had any sense of how much it would capture the public’s imagination.

“I’d been sponsoring Danny for a few years before this video,” says Cleaver. “I knew he was good but he was so far out of the public eye (for years MacAskill was based in the Scottish highlands) that I was the only one who would sponsor him.”

Inspired, like many small companies, didn’t have the resources to invest much in marketing but Cleaver knew that two tried and tested ways of promoting his products was to put them in hand of great riders and showcase them at street trial competitions and, increasingly, through social media videos.

He and Danny had talked about doing a video for a while but it was thanks to Sowerby who shot the video when the prolific rider could grab breaks from his day job working at a bike shop that it ever got made. And it was Sowerby who chose the soundtrack, the haunting “Funeral” by Band of Horses.

“We’d never cleared music rights before,” in our other bike videos explains Cleaver, “but when this one got one million views in the first 48 hours we thought, ‘Uh oh’ we might be in trouble.” There followed a tense couple of weeks as Inspired contacted Band of Horses’ record label to seek permission. Though as millions more people started tuning into the video spurred by huge media interest (we highlighted it in our YouTube Brandwatch column a few days after it was uploaded), the label saw the marketing potential and asked only that Inspired credit the track and offer a viewers a chance to buy it on iTunes.

The YouTube success was such a surprise that Inspired initially was in no position to capitalise on its social media success. For one thing, the company was only selling bike frames and yet they were receiving enormous interest from mainstream mountain bikers who wanted to get their hands on Danny’s bike. “We were completely on the wrong end of the market.  Had we had an inkling of its potential then we would have had much more product.” ” says Cleaver.

Yet even though Inspired didn’t make much money from the initial social media experiment (it did see an upsurge in bike part sales) the feedback Cleaver was getting from bike fans all over the world gave him the confidence to fast track the development of a new hybrid street-trial/mountain bike that he’d been planning. In December Inspired launched its first two high-end models retailing at £1100 and £1500 respectively. So far the two-man Inspired has sold 70 of these niche bikes and is working feverishly to introduce a new product line for 2011.

Today, Danny MacAskill is still riding for Inspired and the company is more committed than ever to telling its story through social media especially the videos that so resonate with its new,broader target market. Not that Cleaver is anticipating another YouTube hit on the scale of Danny’s first video. “If we’d tried to plan that it wouldn’t have worked. The best ones always are unplanned,” he says. But inspired, nonetheless.