The rise and rise and rise of video

by Steve Keenan

My campaign to put video at the top of any must-do list for a blogger or website editor is coming along nicely.

I have long been banging on about the need to have video to stand out from the crowd. Now it’s getting to the point of just keeping up with the Joneses next door.

A safari company boss I did some video training with is kicking himself that it has taken so long to re-launch his website (with video capability) that a competitor has stolen a march and posted several videos of lodges on his site.

And at least two other firms I met at the Association of Independent Tour Operators (Aito) conference in Madeira at the weekend are ruing not launching video earlier as competitors have sneaked ahead.

(To be fair, one is Inside Japan, which a year ago was planning to give video cameras to clients on escorted tours – and post the results on its TV channel. The tsunami delayed plans but managing director Alistair Donnelly assures me he’s back on track).

Video is now becoming mainstream, with YouTube the second largest search engine on the planet (good to see at least a dozen operators have their own channels). Video shows up better in Google search results, stands out in search results and keeps people on a blog or website longer.

Blog and website owners have always known it would be nice to have but now it’s getting harder to ignore as it makes the site easier to find online. Cost is usually the reason for delaying but as we showed at Social Travel Market last year, it doesn’t have to be that pricey.

And now I’ve heard of another way to get video out there, at an even lower cost. The clever people at Intrepid Travel, an adventure company based out of Australia but with offices in the UK and Canada, recently worked with US food bloggers The Perennial Plate.

The couple behind the blog who took one of Intrepid’s food-based trips in Vietnam and produced a high-quality video in return for the free trip and a payment for producing the video – which Intrepid has its name on, and can also use on its site.

Video: The Vietnamese food trail

The video was posted on their blog and picked-up by Vimeo, The New York Times and The Huffington Post, and as a result got over 300,000 views in three weeks. It has also been shared more than 1,100 times on Facebook.

An understandably happy PR manager for the UK, Nicola Frame, said: “We were pleased with the results - and are discussing further trips for them over the coming months.”

The company has also just run a competition challenging travellers to show how intrepid they are. It received 723 entries and seven of the 10 finalist entries most voted for in a public poll were, you guessed it, submitted on video. (See the winner here).

It’s the age of the video – and one that’s only starting in terms of how clever it will be used in social media in future.