Alberta Business Marketing

Google gloats that over 2 Billion videos are viewed on YouTube each day, but don’t discount the value of posting video to your business fan page on Facebook. After all, Flickr was the most popular photo sharing site until sharing on Facebook became so popular. Now photo sharing on Facebook dwarfs that on Flickr. Youtube has big advantages over Facebook

Although views of videos uploaded directly to Facebook have more than tripled over the last year, according to comScore, and more and more phones have video cameras built into them, I don’t expect the video sharing on Facebook to take over Youtube’s positioning. For one thing, many video cameras including the iPhone make it super simple to upload video directly from iTunes to Youtube. Also, Facebook video quality is relatively poor compared to dedicated video sharing sites.

Facebook lacks HD Video

One thing that Facebook could do to encourage growth in video uploads to the social networking site is to provide HD video upload capability. As of now, file size and file quality are still too low for most folks to spend the time rendering their video files for the relatively small video audience on Facebook. For now, linking out from Facebook fan page to your HD video hosted on Youtube, Vimeo, or Blip.tv are best bet.

Tags: Facebook, Video
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Google Maps has neatly integrated photos and videos that have been geotagged.  If users take the time to put their media on the map when uploading, Google Maps users are provided with links to your media!

Hey, it just takes an extra minute to properly tag you photos with map information.  You are already tagging your photos with compelling titles and keyword tags, right?

Tags: Google Maps, google news, maps, media, multimedia, photos, Video
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Online videos are an excellent way to promote tourism.  Background music and sound effects are an important component of the production.  And as much as you’d really like to use tunes from your iTunes music library, it’s simply not legal to use commercial music in your online video projects.

The solution! Free online music and sound effects resources for online Video

We were delighted to come across http://freeplaymusic.com which licenses free music tracks to enhance video production projects for Web distribution.  We use this site almost exclusively to lay down music on videos.

Another source of Creative Commons Music for videos can be found at http://creativecommons.org/legalmusicforvideos/

Do you know of any other sources of free music for online video production and distribution?
Please share your free music resources for online video in the comments.

Tags: music, online video, sound effects, Video
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This past month we’ve been working with a television production graduate intern who showed me how much talent I was lacking, despite my best efforts to record and edit video. Topher Earl produced a handful of fabulous promotional videos like the one below.

In 2003 when I started training tourism folk in Internet marketing there was NO video on the Web.

In 2007 (it seems like only yesterday) I presented an Internet Marketing workshop with a slide that showed 9 million videos being viewed on the Internet each day, up from 8 million just a few months before.

How times have changed.
In just five short years of existence, Youtube video viewership has ballooned to what Google reports as 2 Billion video views per day, double what it was just 18 months ago.

What does the online video revolution mean to tourism businesses?
Some of us are in the online media business now. I spent the weekend working on a job description for a new position with our tourism business at Northern Edge Algonquin.  We’re hiring a full time video producer.  Specifically, we’re looking for a graduate from a media production program at a community college to produce, record, edit, and distribute online video on a full time basis.  The successful candidate will produce media for more than just ourselves, but you get the drift.

It’s show time!

Tags: Video, youtube
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TripAdvisor’s TripWow is a little over the top, but the idea of helping travelers create embeddable multimedia is a great one for the travelers.
The promise: Create a Slide Show that will make your friends go “Wow”.

The benefits for TripAdvisor – click throughs to TripAdvisor destination pages via keyword-laden hyperlinks to kickstart the travel planning process for TripWow slideshow viewers. Interestingly, the terms of use for the TripWow widget prohibit users from disassembling the widget and removing the keyword hyperlinks. The secondary benefit for TripAdvisor is some serious keyword SEO for TripAdvisor destination pages.

If growing traffic is your aim, make it easy for visitors to create and share media
If I was in the travel information archiving business (travel review sites, destination marketing organizations and travel associations), I’d forgo the development of my own platform and work with a company like Animoto to help folks create travel videos that more effectively focus on the photos of the traveler, with embedded music tracks.

A custom branded version of Animoto would create greater interest in your travel information site while adding a small revenue stream for Animoto, perhaps leading to the DMO, travel association or travel information site to pay for the higher resolution services of Animoto’s great travel promotion tool – making it free for travelers to create and share media promoting your website.

I’d also make sure that it was easy to geotag the photo sets and create a similar mapping graphic as shown in TripAdvisor’s TripWow tool part of the show. TripAdvisor’s map owes it’s inspiration to the likes of Indiana Jones, and the maps work well but frankly speaking, most of the other graphic elements of the video take attention away from the trip photos.

I am a fan of the social media tools that pop out from the right side of the videos. They make it easy to share the media by Twitter, Facebook and making the media easy to embed. The Video branding and destination keyword links are sure to drive serious page views for TripAdvisor.

TripWow’s bow is perhaps the inspiration you need to get into providing media production tools like this with a partner who has demonstrated expertise in creating Wow video that focuses on user generated photos and video. Page views are sure to follow.

Tags: Destination Marketing, dmo, free web marketing stuff, travel, travel information, trip advisor, tripwow, Video
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