Speed Necessary for Viral?

Interesting case that I'm curious about feedback. Five of our football players were making a surprise visit to the Razorback Marching Band Spectacular to do a drum line performance. We sent our New Media crew to shoot the event, and got great HD video. We planned on building a package. That took us a day. In the meantime, we were beat to YouTube by, of course, a cell phone video.

Compare. RazorVision vs. cell phone. Obviously, we have interviews and a better angle. But in the world of viral video, we can't catch the cell phone. As of this post, we're at about 4,500 views; the cell phone video is at 15,000. They got a 10K view head start in one day.

We did all the right things -- took our video that was bound for RazorVision inside our web presence and "freed" it to YouTube. Tweets, facebooks, encouraging sharing.

So my question is this -- does it become better in the viral to get something out there and be first, or take the time to build something that shapes to what you wanted to portray. Obviously our video quality gets it another bump by inclusion in this week's ESPNU telecast.