Online video viewership continues to grow exponentially, but it doesn’t stop there – mobile video viewing is also expected to increase. According to eMarketer, the population of mobile video viewers in the US will grow nearly 30% in 2010 to reach 23.9 million, they predict it is poised to double by 2013. More viewers means more opportunity for revenue and eMarketer predicts that mobile video revenues, including direct downloads, subscriptions and ad-supported video, will roughly triple between 2009 and 2014, rising from $436 million to $1.34 billion.

There is no better time than the present to get in on the action, so grab a digital camera and hit record. As a hotelier, what video content appeals to users, travelers and potential guests and how do you create it? We’ve put together a few ideas to get you started.

The Tools

Camera

The cost of video equipment used to be one of the biggest hurdles to creating video content yourself. Now, with the advance of technology, you can be a budding film maker for under $200. Check out the various models of the Flip Cam or Kodak’s HD pocket camera line.

Platform

No way to put the videos on your site? No problem – link to them. It takes minutes to start up a YouTube Channel and don’t count out social media channels. Facebook is a great place to share helpful videos with your fan base.

The Script

Keep your content casual and make sure what you film is a resource to viewers. Think about subjects that travelers would be interested in.

No one really wants to watch a video of your bar opening party (unless there are celebrities present) but they’d love to watch your expert mixologists walk them through how to make the most popular cocktail. This way you highlight your staff, service and product while still providing guests with useful information.

Some other ideas are to have your Concierge walk through the neighborhood and point out his or her picks for the best places to go and see. Or, film your housekeeping staff with their best tips for packing and where to look before you leave to avoid a trip to lost and found.

Check out how the Trump International Hotel and Tower Chicago used video to promote their fitness center with a Special Pumpkin Workout during the month of October. They also posted their video on their Smartstay mobile phone application for the iPhone and Android. Video is very popular with smartphone users and hotels can easily post their videos on the Smartstay app for their guests to enjoy.

The Campaign

Really want to attract mobile or traditional online viewers? Create an entire campaign around an idea. Pick a weekend or two to post special rates and hand out a few flip cams to lucky guests. Ask them to film their stay (this is a big hit with families with teens) for a chance to win a free trip with all the bells and whistles. Post all of the submitted videos to your Facebook page and have fans vote for the best trip video. You can also post the videos on your mobile app. And, don’t forget to film the winner when they arrive for their VIP treatment to bring it all full circle!

For more information about Online Hotel Marketing or the Smartstay mobile app for hotels, please call O’Rourke Hospitality Marketing at 978-465-5955 or send an e-mail to info@orourkehospitality.com.

Even though you are not directly promoting your hotel in the video, your brand will still be associated with the content, and you could have a link back to your hotel website. Once you discover and create the content your target audience is searching for, you must also take steps to promote your video online, and optimize it with keywords so it will appear in the search engine results pages.

Why should brands create online videos?

Video plays a significant part in internet marketing, and brands can use video to increase their online presence, engage viewers, and direct more traffic to their websites. Internet users enjoy watching videos, which is proven by the statistics that YouTube receives over a billion views a day, and that 20 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

Corporations are starting to see the importance of using online videos and the great opportunities it provides them. Online video is considered ‘lean forward’ content because it is something the viewer has searched for, and elected to watch. The traditional T.V. ad is more ‘lean back’ content because the viewer didn’t choose to watch it, and often considers it to be an interruption of their television program.

It is also less expensive to create internet videos than T.V. spots. There are many sites where a corporation could place their videos, and many of them are free. There is also a chance that a video could go ‘viral’ which means other sites may pick it up, and people may forward it to each other.

How are brands using video?

Brands should create content specifically for the internet, and not just re-purpose television ads. Online videos are different than T.V. ads, and they should contain more authentic content with real people and real situations. One brand that works well with online video is Victoria’s Secret. Yes, perhaps this is no surprise, and they may have an upper hand here. However, they have created a fantastic Facebook page for Victoria’s Secret PINK line and have posted 16 videos. They have more than 1 million fans.

Sears was not as successful, and simply re-purposed their television ads and placed them on their facebook page. It is obvious to the viewer that they are watching an ad, and most people instinctively loose interest when they feel they are being sold to.

Brands shouldn’t rely on just one video, but should create a whole portfolio of videos. Red Bull has a video section on their website with videos that were produced years ago but are still getting views.

The Home Depot publishes educational how-to videos which indirectly promote their products without pitching them. The content of the video is focused on providing the viewer with information on how to make small repairs. Therefore, if someone is searching on ‘how to fix a toilet,’ a Home Depot video may come up. If the viewer watches that video they will see some of the Home Depot tools that they may then want to purchase.

InterContinental Hotels produced over 700 online videos about the cities where their hotels are located and posted them on their In The Know website. These videos are narrated by the concierge of the hotel who takes the viewer on a tour of the city and points out the monuments, restaurants, and points of interest. The videos were produced for relatively the same amount of money it would have cost to produce one T.V. ad. The videos were also picked up by numerous sites and were shown on an in-flight program. InterContinental Hotels thought about what the consumer would want to know and created content around it. To read more about the InterContinental videos see our blog.

How will your video be found?

Once you have discovered what travelers may be searching for, and have created video content around that, it is time to ‘seed’ your videos so they will be found by your target audience. Do some keyword research to find out what terms your target audience may be searching on. For example if you created a video about restaurants in Chicago brainstorm the various ways a person may search for that term such as; restaurants in Chicago, places to eat in Chicago, or Best Restaurants Chicago.

You should strive to have your video appear on the first few pages of Google for your selected keywords. Videos can appear organically in the search engine results pages and they can also appear in the videos tab on the navigation bar at the top left of a results page.

There is no cut and dry formula to ensure your video will appear in organic search, but there are some steps you can take that will increase its position in the search engine results pages. When you upload your video to a site such as YouTube, make sure to put your main keywords in the title of the video. You must also place your keywords in the ‘tag’ box and include them in the description of your video. Your video ranking is also affected by the number of views and votes your video has received.

Google has also just announced two YouTube features this month that could help your videos appear in organic search. The first is a preliminary roll-out of automatic captioning or auto-caps. YouTube will be able to create captions for videos using the current automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology. Auto-caps was developed mostly to allow videos to be accessible to the hearing-impaired, and to enable people around the world to access the content in 51 languages. However, the captions will also help your video appear in the search engine results pages for relevant keyword searches. Auto-caps is a work in progress, and sometimes the captions are correct, and other times they are not so good, but as Google says, it is better than nothing.

The second feature Google is launching is called automatic caption timing, or auto-timing, which will make it easier for people uploading video to create captions manually. In the past it was a bit difficult and time-consuming to add captions so most people avoided it. With auto-timing you just need to create a text file of your transcript and Google will use ASR technology to match up the captions to your video. For more information, see the Google blog post on Automatic captions.

Other video hosting services are looking for ways to incorporate Search Engine Optimization tactics as a feature of their site. One such company is Fliqz.com which just released SearchSuccess this month, which is a set of tools and applications for video search engine optimization. One of their clients, Design World Online, has submitted 1,000 videos and 700 of them are already on the first page of the search engine results.

Apart from having your video appear in the search engine results pages, you should also promote your video on other sites. Place your video on your website and facebook account. Send tweets on Twitter that link to your video. Find similar videos on the same topic and post a video response with your video. Join discussion groups and post your video with your thoughts. You can also tag your video on social bookmarking sites such as delicious and StumbleUpon. Submit articles to travel-related magazines and embed your video.

Upload your video to video-sharing sites. There are hundreds of video sites available but some of the most popular ones are YouTube, Yahoo video, Vimeo, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, Veoh, and Blip.tv.

A good free tool to help you upload your videos is called Tubemogul. All you have to do is upload your video once, and Tubemogul can distribute it to over 20 different sites. You have to spend some initial time setting up accounts in the various video-sharing sites, but after that it can save you a lot of time. You will also be able to see the analytics of your video and learn what keywords viewers used to find your video.

We recently met up with Brett Wilson, CEO and co-founder of TubeMogul, at Ad Tech New York and conducted a brief interview. Tom O’Rourke CEO/Founder of O’Rourke Hospitality Marketing asked Brett what his advice would be to hotels in terms of creating content and then optimizing the content to appear in the search engine results pages.

Brett responded that hotels need to be thinking about what their target audience is searching for, and create content around that. He believes that video is the best medium to engage guests with your hotel. Although Brett stated he wasn’t an SEO expert, he stressed that Google looks for relevancy so your keywords must be relevant to the content. He also suggested that hotels post a video and then observe what happens. Look at the keyword reports to see which terms viewers used to find your video and then go back and iterate the keywords that are most effective.

If you would like to learn more about creating videos for your hotel please see our blog post Create Videos for Your Hotel

Rather than produce one television spot, InterContinental Hotels & Resorts chose to produce online videos which showcase more than 150 cities where their hotels are located. Working with TurnHere, they were able to produce more than 700 stunning videos for the same price it would have cost to produce just one television spot.

These intriguing videos are narrated by the concierge of the hotel who takes the viewer on a tour of the city. The videos have been extremely successful and have been used across the brand’s online marketing initiatives. The videos have also been picked up by numerous editorial sites which is free publicity for InterContinental. Below is a video clip where Jared talks about the concept, process, and result of this innovative video project.

Tom O’Rourke, Founder/CEO of O’Rourke Hospitality Marketing, encourages his clients in the Hotel Industry to use online video because it is a very powerful and inexpensive sales tool that can build a hotel brand and attract new business. Tom wanted to share Jared’s insight on internet videos with the hotel industry and asked him to discuss the InterContinental Hotels & Resorts case study.

Jared explained why InterContinental decided to produce the videos instead of a television spot. He said that InterContinental had a marketing budget, for example a million dollars, that they could have spent creating a really nice television spot that touted their 1000 count bed sheets as opposed to Hilton’s 1000 count bed sheets. They could have spent that money on a great spot and put it out on television where everyone would probably TiVo through it and didn’t want to see it in the first place.

InterContinental decided in a really forward thinking way to take the same money and produce videos that created a sense of their local market knowledge. So rather than tout their bed sheets, or the size of their rooms, or the quality of the hotels, they wanted to tout their market knowledge of every city where they have a hotel. The concierge of each hotel narrates the video and takes the viewer on a tour of the city and showcases the best things to do, the best things to see, and the best places to eat.

Jared then explained the production process and said TurnHere created really interesting video content around these tours, and then chopped them up into the various component pieces. So for example they have a video about a restaurant in London, a video about a nightclub in Hong Kong, and a video about a park in Dubai. They then posted the videos broadly throughout the web and meta-tagged them correctly so the videos would be found for multiple keywords in Search.

The result is that InterContinental now has thousands of pieces of content on the web which will be found by travelers searching the internet. For example, if someone is thinking about traveling to Dubai and they conduct a search on Google for great places to eat in Dubai, several results will show up – one of which may be an InterContinental video showcasing restaurants in Dubai.

Jared explains it this way:

It’s super-relevant for me as a consumer, super-relevant for InterContinental, because while they’re not talking about the hotel itself, their concierge is in there, their brand is on that content, they are associated with content that is super-valuable to their consumers without shoving down a brand message, or without selling to any of these consumers and they’ve received a remarkable bang for the buck in doing all this.

Because it’s content, because it’s not viewed as advertising, it’s been picked up on editorial sites from all across the web, it’s shown on some in-flight entertainment systems now. The content is incredible and they didn’t pay for any of that (publicity), they just paid to create the great content.

What their insight was – here’s my consumer, here’s what my consumer wants to know, and obviously if I’m thinking about traveling I want to know about that market. So I am going to create great content to give that consumer what he or she wants to know, and I’m going to associate my brand to it, rather than selling to those consumers.

As Tom said, “That makes so much sense!”  Tom also wanted Jared to speak to the hotelier at a smaller, independent property who doesn’t have a big budget for video. He asked him what he would recommend to this group as far as producing video themselves or having videos professionally shot.

Jared doesn’t promote producing user-generated videos and says for a video to be engaging and compelling it must be produced by professionals. He stressed that you want to make the content very authentic and real, not a glitzy ad spot, but if you want to make it authentic in a high-quality way that takes a talented professional. He advises hotels to figure out what people want to know, figure out a story they’d be interested in hearing, create content around it, and associate your brand with it. He states that any hotel can do that – big or small.

Here at O’Rourke, we agree with Jared that if your videos are a central component of your internet marketing plan, such as the Intercontinental Hotels & Resorts videos, then they should be professionally produced. However, we do encourage hotels to create their own videos about special events at their hotel or guest interviews that can be posted on their blog. This can give the hotel a personal touch and generate more traffic to your website.

You can see the videos at the Intercontinental Hotels & Resorts ‘In The Know’ Website, but be warned, you just may be tempted to take a vacation!

Chris Brogan was very busy running the show at the 2009 Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston, MA, yet being the cool guy that he is, he took the time to share his own insight with us on how hotels should be using Social Media.

Chris is President of New Marketing Labs, and one of the masterminds behind the Inbound Marketing Summit Conferences. He is also the co-founder of the PodCamp new media conference series. His blog ranks #1 on the Ad Age Power 150, and in the top 100 on Technorati. Chris is the co-author of the New York Times Bestseller, ‘Trust Agents,’ with Julien Smith. Trust Agents is about using the web to build influence, improve reputation, and earn trust, as explained on the cover of the book.

Tom O’Rourke, founder/president of O’Rourke Hospitality Marketing caught up with Chris at the Summit, and asked him his thoughts on how the Hotel Industry should be using Social Media. Tom explained to Chris that many General Managers of hotels are thinking of getting into social media, but they aren’t too sure how to use it, or how to staff it. Many are not sure how it is going to help them in the business. He asked Chris what he would recommend to these general managers.

Chris responded by giving a couple examples of hotels and car services that captured his business and attention, just because they were listening and responding in the social media space when he needed them.

Chris explains:

I travel every 2 days – I’m in a hotel more often than I’m in my own bed. There’s so much you can do in this space.

My repeat study is this – The Roger Smith Hotel. I said on Twitter, just to the general audience, ‘Hey, where are cool kids staying in Manhattan these days?’ As you know Manhattan has 400 hotels, probably more than that even. I received an answer right away from this guy Chris who said, ‘The Roger Smith Hotel.’ The very next guy was Brett Petersel from Mashable, ‘The Roger Smith Hotel – they treat you really nice there.’ The third person was The Roger Smith Hotel. They tell me, ‘You should come by, we have a blogger’s discount.’ I said, ‘well sure.’ I stayed, I had a great time. They are always vigilant, they are always paying attention, they are always bringing in revenue by being kind. They are doing nothing harder than saying we’d love to have you here, there might be a discount.

I’ve seen lots of other hotel chains do it. I mentioned I had to come down to Miami. Three hotels talked to me. I mentioned I’m going to this location and they said, ‘If you’re ever in our area we’d love to have you here.’ So if nothing else, the listening element of the social media tools is business generation. Pure and easy.

Tom agrees with Chris, and emphasizes the importance of listening in the Hotel Industry. Tom states, “A lot of the hotels I see out there today, and the way they are using social media tools like Twitter, it’s kind of taking a social media tool and still using it in a traditional way – in so far as ‘here are my special deals.’ Are they listening or are they speaking too much?”

Chris responds:

They’re just talking, and we don’t care. The difference is, it’s called listening and point of need. Marcell LeBrun from Radian 6 had that term. He said that it only comes when you are at the point of need. For example, I’m in Seattle . . . I mention that I have a problem. I said my cab hasn’t showed up, my town car also hasn’t shown up. I’m waiting. I’m due at Microsoft. A guy with a national footprint of professional car service contacts me right away on Twitter and says, ‘Here’s my number – if you ever have this problem again, call me soon enough and I’ll fix it anywhere in the U.S.’ That’s listening! But if he had asked me 3 weeks ago – I have a car service, you should get my car service, it’s great – I would have paid no attention. I didn’t have the issue then.

So if someone’s saying, ‘We’re heading to Vegas,’ or if someone’s saying, ‘We’re planning to take a beautiful golfing trip to Sanibel Island Florida,’ that’s when you say, ‘I run the Sanibel Harbor Resort, and it’s a beautiful hotel and it’s got a great course right down the road. We’d love to have you here. Come by!’ The minute you get that personalized touch, the minute they act like a person, you are doing business with people. You don’t do business with advertisements. Sometimes a pretty picture helps but if there’s no human behind it, to kind of bring us in and tell a story with us, there’s no value.

Here at O’Rourke, we hope that after having watched this video you begin to think about your own hotel’s reputation management and social media strategy. Are you listening to your guests? They are talking! If you aren’t participating in the social media space yet, we recommend that you start by listening. If you are participating in Social Media, are you listening and responding as much as you could?

It does take some time and commitment to listen, however it has become a necessary task if you want to know who your guests are, what they are saying about you and your competition, what they like and dislike, and how you can improve your hotel. Listening is also imperative in order to stay on top of reputation management. Many companies now have positions such as ‘Chief Listening Officer,’ and that person does nothing but research and listen to what customers say and want.

John Jantsch, creator of Duct Tape Marketing, and a presenter at the 2009 Inbound Marketing Summit, compiled a list of a ‘do it yourself’ tools that help you monitor conversations surrounding your brand or hotel.  The list can be found on his blog, and we have recreated it below:

• Google alerts – Google Alerts allows you set-up customer searches for any phrase and receive email or RSS alerts any time your phrase shows up in online media, blogs, web pages and news.

• Search.twitter – For now, monitoring twitter is a separate stream (Google seems to be adding twitter conversations to SERPs) – using the advanced search function allows you set-up very specific searches, even including geographic details. These searches produce RSS feeds and can then be subscribed to.

• tweetbeep.com – Similar to Google Alerts, but for twitter. Set-up search phrases and receive notification any time your phrases show up in twitter conversations.

• Boardtracker.com – focuses on the most popular bulletin board conversations and can turn up responses that don’t show up anywhere else. Some industries still have very heavy bulletin board use.

• Backtype.com – Backtype is a search engine of sorts that focuses on blog comments. Blog comments don’t often make it into the mainstream search results so this is a way to listen in on this set of content.

• Social Mention – this is a mashup search engine of many of the formats of content such as audio and video – I’ve found it a very nice way to turn up some mentions that don’t occur anywhere else.

There are also many advanced paid services that allow you to organize and filter the data you collect. These services also help you analyze the information which can help you see trends and new opportunities. John has also compiled a list of some popular paid services.

• Radian6 – Robust set of analytics, relates data in some very cool ways

• Trackur – advanced set of tools, well worth the cost

• Buzzlogic – focuses on helping you find key influencers driving conversations.

• Filtrbox – very easy to use, powerful and low cost

These tools and services are very helpful and they can capture many comments about your hotel on Twitter, travel-blogs, and forums. However, they may not be capturing all the user-generated reviews from travel review sites such as TripAdvisor, Expedia, Hotels.com, Travelocity, Orbitz, Travelocity, and Fodor’s. If you are using a reputation management service check to see if they include reviews from these travel review sites.

“Hotels today cannot afford to continue thinking in a traditional marketing format. They need to stop pushing their message through conventional channels that tend to interrupt their audience. It’s time to make a change. Listen, Participate, and Engage through Inbound Marketing,” says Tom O’Rourke.

If you would like to develop a social media and reputation management strategy but don’t know where to start, give us a call at 978-465-5955 or send an e-mail to info@orourkehospitality.com

What types of videos can my hotel use?

• Professionally shot promotional videos

The most traditional hotel video is professionally shot and edited, and promotes the hotel or city. You should not attempt to shoot this type of video yourself because it will most likely be a lesser quality and appear to be low-budget. A great example of a promotional video is the Marriott Marquis Times Square.

• Virtual tour / walkthrough

The virtual tour videos are still very popular, and allow the guest to view the hotel as if they were walking through it. This type of video is often composed of a sequence of video images with music and narration. See the JW Marriott Hotel Pennsylvania Avenue video as a good example of a virtual tour.

• Hotel-produced videos

You can create your own videos for your hotel. Many hotels are hesitant to create their own videos because they may be afraid of the technical aspect, or it’s just something they have never done before. However, hotel-produced videos are not meant to replace professional videos about your hotel, they are meant to be more of a communication channel and another way to drive traffic to your website. You could produce short video clips about special events at your hotel, interesting shops and restaurants in your city, or guest interviews. You can then post your videos on your blog and upload them to video sharing sites.

In a previous tip, we interviewed Juli Lederhaus, the General Manager of the historic Hawthorne Hotel in Salem, MA, about blogging. Juli also produced some great videos about the Hawthorne Hotel and Salem, and posted them on her blog and on You Tube. In one video she recorded Jim McAllister, a Salem historian, giving a tour of the Salem Marine Society. This video has received over 1,000 views.

• Guest-produced videos

Parallel to the way travelers are writing and reading guest reviews about hotels, they are also uploading and watching videos about hotels. Guests are no longer satisfied with hotel-produced videos, and they want to see the guests’ videos for the ‘real picture’. They know that hotel-produced videos only showcase the positive aspects of a hotel, and that guest-produced videos will show both the positive and negative aspects. Some guest  videos are taken with the purpose of creating a review, and others are more focused on an event at your hotel such as a wedding or a conference.

Guests can post their videos on video sharing sites such as You Tube, as well as travel review sites such as TripAdvisor. There are many travel related sites that feature guest-produced videos about hotels including Travelistic, IgoUgo, and Hotelly. Brooke Dowd of Luggage Online compiled a list of ‘50 Travel Sites You’ve Probably Never Heard Of’. Many of these sites also allow travelers to post their hotel videos. (As a side note, Luggage Online is a good example of ‘pull marketing’ where travelers are drawn to the Luggage Online website because of the useful information and articles. Once on the site, users may be tempted to purchase a new suitcase!)

Hotels should employ reputation management and monitor guest-produced videos about their hotels. One way to do this is to search on your hotel name in Google and then click on the ‘Video’ tab in the menu at the top. Google will display videos that have your hotel name as a tag. The results may show some of your hotel-produced videos and some guest-generated videos. Below is an example of the video results page for the Hawthorne Hotel in Salem, MA.

So what can hotels do about guest-produced videos? Not a whole lot! However, not all of these videos are undesirable. As mentioned earlier, many travelers prefer to watch guest-produced videos and this can mean more publicity for your hotel. If a previous guest does create a negative video about your hotel you should try to remedy the situation. Some sites such as TripAdvisor allow you to post a manager’s response. We also suggest that you create many hotel-produced videos that you do have control over.

Another piece of advice, if you can’t beat them, join them! A good example of this is the Seaport Hotel in Boston who even joined in on a guest-produced video about their hotel. In this case, there was an AAJA convention and many of the journalists stayed at the Seaport Hotel. One reporter filmed a video at the hotel which focused on the ‘Pillow Library’ which allows guests to select hypoallergenic, down and memory foam pillows. In the video, an AAJA member requested a pillow, but the hotel didn’t have that pillow at the time.

The guests then interviewed Matthew Moore, the Seaport Hotel Room Director, who kindly explained that due to the popularity of the program, the hotel needs to limit the pillow quantity to four a room. He also said that the hotel has a waiting list if the pillow of choice is not available. Moore added some humor to the situation and discussed the best type of pillow for a pillow fight. The final outcome is that Moore’s participation in the video turned the situation around, and what could have been a negative video became a positive one.

Another hotel chain that is embracing the use of videos is the Omni Hotels. Last summer they even offered guests complimentary usage of Flip Video camcorders. Guests could film anything they liked and enter the video in a contest for a chance to win a trip to the Omni Bedford Springs Resort.

Why does My Hotel Need Videos?

• Videos can increase your online visibility and drive traffic to your website.

If you optimize your videos correctly, they can appear in the search results of Google for your chosen keywords. You can also place your videos on your blog, video-sharing sites, or in your articles.

Below is an example of how video increased the Hawthorne Hotel’s online visibility. We conducted a search on ‘Salem Marine Society’ and the Hawthorne video appeared as number 4 on the first page of Google (see below), and number 1 under videos. This means that someone interested in visiting Salem for the marine history, may see the Hawthorne Hotel’s video and decide to book a room.

• Guests enjoy watching videos.

According to an Official YouTube Blog post on October 9th, the site receives over a billion views a day! And as the Pew Internet & American Life Project reports, the share of adults who watch videos on video sharing sites has nearly doubled since 2006. Fully 62% of adult internet users have watched video on these sites, up from 33% who reported this in December 2006.*

* Madden, Mary. The Audience for Online Video-Sharing Sites Shoots Up. Pew Internet & American Life Project, July 29, 2009, http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/13–The-Audience-for-Online-VideoSharing-Sites-Shoots-Up.aspx, accessed on October 14, 2009.

• Videos can engage your guests.

A large percentage of your target audience is online, and you can reach them with engaging content, whether it be through social media sites, blogs, or videos. Videos are interesting to guests, and can also help give a human voice to your hotel.

• Your video could ‘go viral’.

If a video is very unique, people may send it to each other, send tweets about it on Twitter, or put it on their Facebook or blog. A video that achieves this widespread popularity is considered a viral video. The videos that go viral are often funny, dangerous or just plain stupid. One example of a video that went viral is called The Best Wedding Entrance Dance Ever and it has received 2,807,042 views. Some companies try to produce videos using comic elements in the hopes that their video will go viral. Companies who attempt this must be clear of their objectives and budget, as these videos can be expensive and there is no guarantee that they will be successful.

How do I Produce Videos for my Hotel?

In the beginning it can be intimidating to record videos or speak in front of the camera. However, it gets easier with practice. Below are some steps you can take to produce, edit and upload your videos. You may have seen some of these tips mentioned in our previous article.

Step One – Buy a Recording Device

• There are many inexpensive cameras on the market. The Flip Mino is only $179 and records great videos. You can also research other cameras and look for features you may want such as microphones, weight, or high definition. Browse through sites such as C-Net, Camcorderinfo.com, B&H or Amazon to see the cameras and price ranges available. You can even record on your iPhone.

Step Two: Record Your Video

•Try to keep your video short. It is often recommended that it be no more than 2 minutes.

• Use a tripod to keep the camera steady.

• Use correct resolution

Use a minimum resolution of 640 x 480 (4:3 SD) or 1280 x 720 (16 x 9 HD) for a wider video. Most cameras will allow you to set the resolution you would like or you may have to modify the video yourself.

• Control light

Try to shoot with one light source. Mixed lighting such as Tungsten lights, florescent lights, and daylight together can affect your colors.

If you are shooting outdoors try to shoot early in the morning or late afternoon to avoid the direct sunlight which can be glaring and cause harsh shadows.

Film with the light source facing the subject, not behind the it which could cause a silhouette effect.

Use supplemental lighting if you need to. These can be handheld objects such as white poster boards. You could also record by light colored stationary objects such as buildings. With practice, you can learn to control the reflected light to reduce shadows.

• Control sound

Be aware of where you are filming and do not record in an environment with a lot of background noise. If possible use an external microphone which will reduce the ambient noise. If you are shooting outdoors enable a low cut or wind cut filter on the microphone.

• Remember the obvious

It is important to keep in mind obvious things that people tend to ‘forget’ in the excitement of filming a video. If you are filming a person remember not to cut off the top of their head. Remind your subjects to be relaxed, speak up, and smile. Bright clothing and an attractive background will help as well.

Step Three: Edit Your Video

There are many programs you can use to edit your videos. We have outlined a few below.

iMovie is a basic program that allows you to crop, color correct, add music and create transition such as fade-outs. iMovie is installed in the Mac computer and is part of the Mac products, but you could you buy parallel software for a PC.

QuickTime Pro is another basic program that allows you crop your video and add audio.  You can also export your video to a format optimized for the internet, iPhone or iPod. QuickTime Pro is available for the Mac or PC.

Final Cut Express, a less expensive version of Final Cut, is designed for the Mac and allows you to create more sophisticated effects.

Adobe Premier Elements is a less expensive version of Adobe Premiere Pro, and is designed for a PC. This software also allows for sophisticated editing.

For more information about editing, see this article on Top 10 Video Editing Software. Most of the software listed is for the PC.

• Brand your video

Many of the editing programs allow you to create banners with your name or logo on the video. Maintain your hotel brand voice and customize your banners with your logo and colors.

• Export video file

It is recommended that you export your video as .mp4 H264. This will give you high quality with a smaller file size than the equivalent Quicktime.mov format. Regarding sound, it is recommended that you use either MP3 or AAC sound encoding, with a sample rate of 44.1kHz. Also, use stereo sound, not mono.

Step Four: Upload Your Video to You Tube and Your Blog

Below is a brief outline of how to upload your video to You Tube and your blog. You should also read Step Five on how to optimize your video and Step Six on how to promote your video.

• Create an account in You Tube. You can also set up a You Tube channel which allows you to brand your colors and upload your logo. To edit your channel, go to your Account menu, select ‘Overview’, click on the icon that says ‘Edit Channel’, then select ‘Channel Design’.

• Select the yellow upload button on the top right hand side of any You Tube page.

• Click ‘Browse’ and select the video you want to upload.

• Click ‘Upload Video’.

• Enter in your Title, Description, and Tags with your keywords. Refer to step five: Optimize Your Video for tips on keyword research.

• Click ‘Save Changes’.

• If  you need help refer to the You Tube help menu.

• Put your video on your website or your blog. Instructions differ on how to embed your video in your blog depending on the blogging software you use. It is not very difficult and you usually copy and paste the embed code from You Tube. You can find tutorials online that will explain the process.

Step Five: Optimize Your Video

Similar to your website, articles, and blogs, you must also optimize your videos so that they appear in the search engine results pages and also in the You Tube results pages. You optimize your You Tube videos with relevant keywords, but your ranking is also affected by the number of views and votes your video has received.

• Optimize your video with keywords

When you upload your video to a video sharing site you must put your keywords in the title, description, and tags. Make sure the keywords used in your title also appear in the description.

• Conduct keyword research

It is important to use relevant keywords that you want your video to appear for. Below are some ideas on how to do this.

-Research the competition for related keywords, tags and descriptions.

-Use You Tube’s built-in keyword suggestions tool. In the search bar you can begin typing a phrase and You Tube will show you predictive text which displays popular search queries in order of search volume. Below is a graphic of the beginning of a search on social media.

Step Six: Promote Your Video

Now that your video is uploaded and optimized you should also ‘seed’ it to as many different places as possible. Below are some suggestions where to place it.

• In step four we explained how to upload your video to You Tube. There are many other video sharing sites where you can submit your video as well.  Open a free account with Tubemogul. This site allows you to upload your video only once, and it will distribute your video to over 20 different sites. You must spend some time setting up the various site accounts, but after that it is very easy. Tubemogul also allows you to track the stats of your videos.

• Send a Tweet with a link to your video. You can shorten your URL with a free tool such as bit.ly. When you upload a video to You Tube you have an option to have it automatically post to Twitter or Facebook.

• Post your video on your Facebook page.

• Submit your video to Social Bookmark sites such as stumbleupon and delicious.

• Place your video on travel related sites and discussion groups.

• Post video responses on You Tube to relevant videos, or add comments that link to your video.

• Distribute articles with your video included.

• If you have more than one video you can link them together for higher viewing.

• Embed you video in Google Maps.

• Create a You Tube Channel and invite your friends and colleagues to subscribe.

• Use a paid service such as You Tube’s ‘Promoted Videos’. This program is similar to pay-per-click ads in that it will display your video alongside the search results of related videos and you only pay when someone clicks on it. Google recently announced that users will now be able to buy Promoted Videos directly in AdWords which will make it easier for users to manage their campaigns.

• When filling out the description box in You Tube, put a link to your website in the beginning.

• Monitor the stats of your video with TubeMogul, YouTube Insights, and Google Analytics.

Video has Changed!

After this extensive tip, we leave you with one final thought: video has changed! Steve Garfield attests to this. Garfield is a Video Producer, Video Blogger and Social Media Guru. He is the author of ‘Get Seen: Online Video Secrets to Building your Business’. Garfield is also the founder of Boston Media Makers and he has been featured on CNN.

Garfield gave a presentation at the 2009 Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston titled, ‘One Step to Putting Video Online by Clicking a Red Button’. In his talk he emphasized how easy it is to record and upload video today. He also talked about the many types of recording devices available including webcams, cell phones, and camcorders.

Steve conducted a fun ‘experiment’ during his presentation and invited everyone with a recording device to come to the stage. He asked us to record him as he recorded us. He wanted to show how easy it was to record and upload a quick video. He recorded us on his iPhone and was able to upload the video directly from his phone to You Tube. Steve recommends attaching a microphone to your iPhone for a better sound quality. There are many microphones available on the market.

The experiment went well and there are now around 20 videos on You Tube of his presentation. Below is our own O’Rourke coverage.

Steve recorded and uploaded his own video.

Have fun with your videos!

Videos are extremely popular on the internet and hotels can greatly benefit from this exciting medium. Potential guests are tired of hearing about how great a hotel is – they want to see it for themselves. Videos can strengthen your online presence, drive more traffic to your website, and help you achieve a higher ranking position in the search engine results pages.

The emergence of social media has shaken up the traditional ways of marketing and has created new channels that allow you to interact with your guests instead of just selling to them. Guests now have access to user-generated content, including review sites such as TripAdvisor, and they want a human voice and information that tells them the real deal about your hotel including the positives and negatives.

So how should videos be used today? Well the answer is in many ways. We still recommend that you have professionally shot promotional videos about your hotel and city. You should not attempt to create this type of video yourself because it could be a lower quality and have the appearance of a low-budget commercial.

However, you are no longer limited to the use of just one genre of video. With practice, you can learn to create your own videos and post them on your hotel blog. These videos should be short clips and can be about special events at your hotel, interesting shops and restaurants in your city, or interviews with people. You can post these videos on your hotel blog as well as on sites such as YouTube.

Keep in mind that your guests may already be posting videos taken at your hotel, such as wedding videos. Often they place the name of the hotel in the ‘tags’ which means that when someone searches on your hotel that video can appear.

As with any new medium, practice makes perfect! Videos may seem intimidating in the beginning but it is not as difficult as you may think. Below are some technical tips to help you start producing your own quality videos.

Buy a Camera

There are many inexpensive cameras that you can buy. The Flip Mino is only $179 and takes great videos. You can also research other cameras and look for features you may want such as microphones, weight, or high definition. Browse through sites such as C-Net, Camcorderinfo.com, B&H or Amazon to see the cameras and price ranges available.

Shoot Your Video

Try to keep your video short. It is often recommended that it be no more than 2 minutes. Use a tripod to keep the camera steady. If you are filming people remind your subjects to be relaxed, speak up, and smile. Bright clothing and an attractive background will help as well.

Use Correct Resolution

Use a minimum resolution of 640 x 480 (4:3 SD) or 1280 x 720 (16 x 9 HD) for a wider video. Most cameras will allow you to set the resolution you would like or you may have to modify the video yourself.

Edit Your Video

There are many programs you can use to edit your videos. We have outlined a few below.

•  iMovie is a basic program that allows you to crop, color correct, add music and create transition such as fade-outs. iMovie is installed in the Mac computer and is part of the Mac products, but you could you buy parallel software for a PC.

•  QuickTime Pro is another basic program that allows you crop your video and add audio.  You can also export your video to a format optimized for the internet, iPhone or iPod. QuickTime Pro is available for the Mac or PC.

•  Final Cut Express, a less expensive version of Final Cut, is designed for the Mac and allows you to create more sophisticated effects.

•  Adobe Premier Elements is a less expensive version of Adobe Premiere Pro, and is designed for a PC. This software also allows for sophisticated editing.

•  For more information, see article on Top 10 Video Editing Software. Most of these are for PCs.

Brand Your Video

Many of the editing programs allow you to create banners with your name or logo on the video. Maintain your hotel brand voice and customize your banners with your logo and colors.

Export Video File

It is recommended that you export your video as .mp4 H264. This will give you high quality with a smaller file size than the equivalent Quicktime.mov format.

Control Sound

When you export a video to be uploaded to you tube, it is recommended that you use either MP3 or AAC sound encoding, with a sample rate of 44.1kHz. Also, use stereo sound, not mono.

If possible use an external microphone which will reduce the ambient noise. If you are shooting outdoors enable a low cut or wind cut filter on the microphone.

Control Light

Try to shoot with one light source. Mixed lighting such as Tungsten lights, florescent lights, and daylight together can affect your colors.

If you are shooting outdoors try to shoot early in the morning or late afternoon to avoid the direct sunlight which can be glaring and cause harsh shadows.

Use supplemental lighting if you need to. These can be handheld objects such as white poster boards, or film by stationary objects such as light colored buildings. With practice, you can learn to control the reflected light to reduce shadows.

Upload Your Video

Now you need to post and promote your video. You need to ‘seed’ it in many different places for the most views. Of course you should put it on your website. If you have a Facebook page put it there. If you use Twitter, send tweets about it. Post it on you tube. You can also submit it to tubemogul and they can distribute it to over 20 different sites for you. Post it on stumbleupon and delicious. Place your video on travel related sites and discussion groups.

Have fun with your videos!

O’Rourke Hospitality Marketing can help your hotel create great videos. For more information on videos call us at 979-465-5955 or send an email to info@orourkehospitality.com.

O’Rourke Hospitality Marketing, 44 Merrimac Street, Newburyport MA 01950, http://www.orourkehospitality.com