Brian Matson, Fargo-Moorhead Convention and Visitors Bureau, shared some excellent tips for video in small town tourism at our Tourism Currents Track at BlogWorld Expo in LA last year.
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| Brian Matson knows great video because he does great video. |
Many destinations create slick, expensive videos to showcase their entire place in 5 to 7 minutes. Each attraction in town only gets a few seconds of face time. The videos get shown at community meetings and trade shows, but they aren’t very useful for most online promotion.
Instead, Matson focuses his online video on conveying an experience or impression of a place.
Limit your shots
Don’t shoot more than 5 seconds at a time. Do away with long boring shots. This also makes production easier as you don’t have to wait on long clips to render when you import them to your video editing software.
Don’t pretend to be what you are not. Just show what you are really like.
Make it multipurpose, then use it in blog posts, create full descriptions to be findable by search engines, share it in social media, and help your partners by featuring them.
He does a new video once a week. They now have over 100 videos of their area.
Record separate audio
A digital audio recorder much less intimidating than a video camera, so Matson uses it to get explanations he can overlay over the video. He’ll ask a person at the attraction to give a quick summary or explain what we see and use it to replace the low quality audio from on-site. Besides, the person from the attraction is always more passionate about it than Matson, so they always sound more interested and excited in the audio.
HD Heroes
HD Hero cameras only cost about $300-400. They are perfect for sharing experiences and also do easy time lapse shots.
Time lapse takes very little editing; just throw the photos into the software and render. It’s agreat way to show action and events, especially during busy times.
Quick Tips
- Quick posting can draw people to subsequent days of multi-day events.
- Know the 5 shots you need to get before you start.
- Shoot when something is happening. Shoot when it’s busy.
- Get fronts of heads and teeth: show faces of people involved, not backs of heads.
- Be the human tripod.
- Forget trying to be all artsy with your video.
- Keep the light behind you.
- On your blog, put (VIDEO) in the post title. It will increase click throughs.
You can see a video of Brian Matson’s presentation in our Tourism Currents Newsletter.
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Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.
