Sheila's Guide To The Good Stuff

A good pitch is timely, short, punchy and answers the question WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?) for the recipient.

If this sounds familiar, it should. A good pitch to bloggers is very much like a good pitch to any media person.

At BlogWorld and New Media Expo West in Los Angeles, I talked to Jared Degnan from Brandware Public Relations about pitching bloggers….the video is about a minute long, and here’s the direct link to it on YouTube in case you can’t see the embed box below.

Did I get it right, or was I too simplistic?  Leave a reply down in the comments….thanks!

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Third in a blog post series for the get-revved-up week between Christmas and New Year’s.

Many people avidly read every one of marketer Seth Godin’s blog posts.

I think it’s mostly because they’re well-written and helpful, but part of the reason is that his posts are often quite short.

As in, a few sentences.

Most of them do not include a photo or video; they’re just plain ol’ text.

But….his readers know that he’ll be pithy, get to the point and not take up too much of their time.

(I won’t go into the fact that he does not allow comments on his posts, which is not how I prefer to blog.  He has his reasons, and it’s his blog, after all.)

Rev-up recommendation for you:

**  Go short more often in 2012.

—->>  Just a few interesting sentences can be a blog post for you, too. Try it one day in the first week of January 2012.

—->>  Make every other Facebook Page update a one-sentence declaration or question for a few days.

—->>  Twitter is MADE for pithy thoughts. In the early days of the service, we called an exactly 140 character tweet a “twoosh.”

—->>  Make your email newsletter unexpectedly short one month (and say that it is short, in your Subject line.) See what happens with the open/click rate. Does it improve?

—->>  Challenge yourself to shoot a 30-45 second video, or a fun Google Search Story or a short Animoto video out of photos you already have.

Can you think of any other ways to “go short?”

For more ideas on effective content creation, see Lesson Two of our Tourism Currents online course, Building a Home Base. It includes a video of our own blogging lessons learned.

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I saw a question by a New England DMO (Destination Marketing Organization) in the LinkedIn Group “DMAI Convention and Visitors Bureau Network” about how to best use online video – they had a few ideas but wanted to ensure that they “maximized potential reach.”

In the spirit of reusing content you’ve already made, here is my answer to them, made into this blog post:

Are the videos available on your YouTube channel?

If so, they can help you with SEO if they are titled, described and tagged with the applicable keywords for each particular video.

Make sure you allow sharing.  As a blogger I like to occasionally share good videos, either embedded in a blog post of my own – like I did with a Guerrilla Packs video in this year’s Passports with Purpose prize post - or, if it’s tourism-related, on our business Facebook Page.

I’d also recommend captioning them for the deaf/hard of hearing – the transcript attaches to the video description, which also helps SEO. Google offers an auto-transcript for some videos that are in English, but the voice recognition is a work in progress (to put it charitably) so you’ll need to heavily edit the text to make it accurate.

For more help with web accessibility issues like captioning, I cannot recommend Glenda Watson Hyatt enough – she’s dynamite.

Videos do very well on Facebook, especially if they’re short, and you can tweet about them as well (the shortened youtu.be URL will open and play right in TweetDeck, for example, so I’m more likely to watch it if I see the tweet.)

If the video would appeal to meeting and event planners, put it on your LinkedIn Company Page for your DMO. You can always get more out of LinkedIn than you think.

I’d have a blog post to go with every video, and of course that post itself will help with SEO. Nothing elaborate; just a little background about the video and then the embed box. Always include a direct text link to the video’s page on YouTube, in case someone is looking at the post via RSS (which won’t show embed boxes) or the embed box goes on the blink.

Once you have the permalink URL to your blog post, go back and add it to the video description on YouTube.  That’s one more way to close the communications loop so if someone finds the video directly on YouTube, they can click through to your blog from the video description. The link is No Follow, but humans can follow it, which is what really matters.

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At the national conference for the AWC (Association for Women in Communications) I was excited to speak at a session with Maria Henneberry about creating and conducting online training through webinars.

AWC organizes and runs a webinar series about a variety of communications topics (I’m on the Tech Committee that finds topics and speakers) plus we run webinars at Tourism Currents related to social media, technology and tourism/hospitality.

So, I have webinars on the brain these days. What are the main things to remember?

Do NOT make boring slide decks, take advantage of the web and multimedia tools, remember that your voice must show the enthusiasm you feel (since in many cases attendees can’t see you) and keep an eye on online presentation tools like Zipcast that easily and cheaply bring video into the mix.

Here’s the direct link to the webinar how-to presentation on my SlideShare channel, and let me know in the comments below if you have questions or feedback.

When you publish to the web, always consider the best possible way to spread your content as widely as possible, and make that content easy for people to share.

It does take more time up front, but increases the chances that more people will see the stuff that is important to you. Yes, even a simple retweet (republishing someone’s tweet in your own Twitter stream) counts as online content, and deserves thoughtful consideration.

Rewire your head to think this way, and your social communications efforts will go further.

How?  Here ‘s an example….

My longtime travel writer friend, Minnesota-based Leif Pettersen, is a talented juggler (he’s also talented at making omelets and quaffing Strongbow hard cider, but let’s not get distracted here.)

So, I see a tweet of his – he’s @LeifPettersen on Twitter – talking about his video from the 2011 International Jugglers’ Association Festival that he just attended. The link he used went back to his own blog post, with the video embedded there, but I decided to do some tweaking before I helped send it down the digital road.

The specific URL matters

I went to get the permalink URL of the actual video uploaded on Leif’s YouTube channel. You can get there from any YouTube video embed box – look at the bottom right of the box and mouse over the YouTube logo. It will say “Watch on YouTube.” Click through to go there.

Pros: I want to tweet the YouTube URL because I and many of my followers use TweetDeck or Hootsuite dashboards for Twitter, and a YouTube URL opens right in the dashboard for viewing rather than forcing another tab to open in a browser. That way, people are more likely to click Play and watch Leif’s video right at that moment.

Cons:  Leif would probably prefer Twitter traffic to be driven to his blog to watch the video. Understandable, but I’m mostly interested in maximum people finding out about him (because he’s a great guy) so my priority is to make the video as easy as possible to watch.

ABC – Always Be Connecting

As long as I’m on Leif’s YouTube channel getting the URL for the juggling video, I confirm that I’m subscribed to his channel myself, I click the “thumbs up” icon to Like his video, and I can also mark it as a Favorite.

Every little bit helps give his content more visibility in search engines, and the Likes and Favorites are also reflected in the Recent Activity section of my Sheila Scarborough YouTube channel, similar to updates that show up in news feeds on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Pros: More love for Leif’s content. Increases chances that he’ll buy me a Strongbow when we visit in person.

Cons: None that I can see.

Who else needs a nudge?

Back over on Twitter, I’m ready to tweet about Leif and the jugglers, but first, I want to capture more attention by including possibly related Twitter handles. Who else can I lead to his Twitter profile and video?

Let’s see, is the International Jugglers’ Association on Twitter as well? You bet; they’re @IntJugglersAssn and I want to ensure they know about Leif’s video if they don’t already. One of the best ways to do that is to include their Twitter name, which they will see I’ve done when they check their Twitter account for mentions. In a perfect world, they’ll retweet Leif’s link as well (and say thanks to him.)

My tweet ultimately looked like this:

“Juggle THIS!  Things fly in this video from @IntJugglersAssn festival  http://youtu.be/zKxPTFgML1I  by @LeifPettersen”

Bonus points – was there a juggling festival hashtag that people might be following? I’d have worked that in, too. There was none that I could find in this case.

More bonus points – Send it out from another account? My business partner Becky McCray and I also tweet as @TourismCurrents. Our customers – tourism organizations – spend a lot of time trying to attract festivals, meetings and special events. Maybe they would be interested in this big juggler bash.

I hunted down the Twitter handle for the city that hosted the 2011 festival – Rochester, Minnesota – and sent out an additional, separate tweet as @TourismCurrents that included the Twitter handle of the Rochester CVB (Convention and Visitors Bureau.)

It looked like this:

“What fun @RahRahRochester CVB must have had hosting this juggling event!  http://youtu.be/zKxPTFgML1I  via @LeifPettersen”

Pros:  Same content, tailored slightly differently, went out from two different Twitter accounts. A few thousand more people have a chance to see Leif’s video, and the Rochester CVB gets a shout-out.

Cons:   Many of the same people follow me both as @SheilaS and @TourismCurrents. I don’t want to overload their streams with too much duplicate or close-to-duplicate content, so I try to put a minimum of 10 minutes or more between similar tweets that go from both accounts.

Why bother with all this?

A few minutes of thought – a little extra research and digging – over the course of the almost four years that I’ve been on Twitter….well, the extra efforts add up in reach and impact.

All you’re doing is pausing to think, “Who else should know about this content, and what is the best way to get their attention?”

It’s the persistent, relentless mindset needed for winning a marathon. If you’re in the communications game for the long haul, you’ve got to play it that way.

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Ask yourself this question:  when is video content better for your objectives than anything else, including photos or text?

Answer  -  the best reason to shoot video is to show something interesting that wouldn’t be as powerful if shown any other way.

Here’s a 36 second example below from my own video archives….a bow-making machine at the Hallmark Visitor Center in Kansas City, Missouri.

Even though it was one of my early efforts with a Flip camera, and even though my voice narration is fighting to be heard over the mechanical noises and the voice of a nearby tour guide (bad audio is the video click-away kiss of death) I still can’t think of anything besides video to really show how bows are made.

For some of the stories that you want to tell, video is more effective than any other medium. How can YOU use it?

Direct link to the video below on YouTube.

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In 60 seconds, Beth Conway from the St. Joseph, Missouri CVB – @StJoMo on Twitter – explains why Twitter is NOT about what she had for lunch….

(Here’s the direct link to Beth’s video on YouTube, and here’s the Tourism Currents YouTube channel.)

Thanks Signalfire for featuring the video in their blog post about why social media works for CVBs and DMOs….this demonstrates why you should allow your CVB videos to be embedded on other people’s sites; it helps spread them to a wider audience.

When you make a video, always include a URL in the title or credits, so that those who see the video out on the web can find the rest of your work if they’re interested.

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On the first day of the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) tech conference in Austin, I was part of a video interview project led by Nancy Spears and the genConnect team out of Colorado.

Here are their thoughts on 10 people at SXSW you should include in your social network, which includes a sidebar viewer with all of the videos. I’m rather honored to see that my interview ended up between Rick Murray’s (head of Edelman Chicago) and Jay Rosen’s (renowned journalism professor at NYU.)

In my roughly 3 minute interview (complete with an offstage shout-out by passing Hawaii social media goddess Neenz Faleafine) I described what Becky McCray and I do with social media education at Tourism Currents, how destination marketing today demands more personal interaction with visitors (including online) and how strongly we believe that most tourism pros can already do the really important stuff, which is a lot harder to teach than technology:  creating a compelling portrait of their destination in the eyes of visitors.

The vision and story….you already have it and that’s the hard part, not Facebook, Twitter, blogs et al.

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Although he couldn’t come in person to last year’s TBEX in New York (Travel Blog Exchange conference for travel bloggers – the sold-out 2011 TBEX is in Vancouver) I’ve never forgotten the “remote presentation” created by Brett the Amtrekker.

He’s on a quest to accomplish a big ol’ bucket list of experiences, and since he was on the road in Idaho at the time of the TBEX event, he sent us a video to show us how to do better travel video. Makes sense, right?

Notice the variety of camera angles, the editing down to make it as punchy as possible, that it happily breaks the “Video Must Be Under Two Minutes” diktat, the variation between distant shots and close up, the discussion of viral video mythology….really good information presented in a fun, engaging way.

Here’s what’s cool – he shot the whole thing by himself.

Brett sitting on a tree trunk talking? He set up a tripod for his camera, spoke the lines he’d planned for the video, then with editing software he cut back and forth, closeup and further away.  Everything else, the other clips, were pulled off of his hard drive (or wherever he stores them) and inserted in around his monologue.

Here’s the direct link to the Amtrekker travel video how-to video on YouTube.

Note:  I’ve started this Travel Post Friday series since I’ve now stepped away from my longstanding commitment to the BootsnAll Family Travel Blog. If you like it, there’s more of my travel work on the Perceptive Travel Blog.

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When someone asks me about social media in the hospitality industry, I usually mention the Roger Smith Hotel in New York, AJ Bombers restaurant in Milwaukee and the blog written by Hawaii-based Outrigger Hotels.

Then I wish that I knew more examples.

That problem was just partially solved by this excellent presentation on Slideshare by Lara Dickson, a designer and social media marketing expert based in Vermont. It’s also included in her own blog post, Social for Hospitality 101.

It covers all that any hotel or restaurant needs to know about getting started using social media tools for marketing, and it’s full of ideas and examples.

Thanks a bunch, Lara!

Direct link to the presentation Adding Social Media to Your Hospitality Marketing Toolkit.