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Selling your product is always easier when the customer can see what they are purchasing. For tourism website owners this usually means high quality photography, slideshows and virtual tours. But what about video?
The internet is the biggest library on the planet, so you don’t have to be a budding Stephen Spielberg to put stunning footage on your website. But just what is available and what can we link to?
For the most part, unless you strike lucky, most of the best quality videos will be generic. However, careful selection of what’s out there can provide potential visitors with a flavour of what they can expect in your neck of the woods. So let’s go on a video tour:
Fantashtic
Trying to attract golfing clientele? Check out this Sir Sean Connery-voiced Home of Golf promo that was released recently during the big Homecoming Scotland 2009 marketing push in the USA and Canada.
Indeed, the Scottish Government hosts a large number of video presentations, many of which could prove to be useful background material. This library is updated about once a week. Obviously, the subject matter is wide ranging, so link directly to the relevant video rather than point visitors to the broadcast home page.
(Hint: Click on the small TV icon to view the video and capture the link. Clicking on the news headline goes to the text only.)
Here is a selection of videos that may interest the tourism sector:
Sea eagles have landed
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/News/Releases/2008/06/20141017/Q/Video/478
Sailing buoyed by investment
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/News/Releases/2008/06/19112400/Q/Video/476
Reintroduction of beavers
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/News/Releases/2008/05/22122917/Q/Video/477
Safety on the Mountains
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/News/Releases/2008/03/10171457/Q/Video/453
Launch of Scottish Wildcat Survey
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/News/Releases/2008/02/19091811/Q/Video/445
Robert Burns 2008
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/News/Releases/2008/01/24104549/Q/Video/436
Clipping video
Also try searching for suitable videos at youtube, you may be surprised by what you turn up.
With youtube clips there are a number of options:
1) Create a custom search and paste as a text link on your own site.
This youtube search on Lochaber turned up 109 videos for example.
Inserting other keywords will help narrow down the scope. For example,
try Lochaber + shinty
2) Search out a selection of relevant videos and link to them directly.
Here’s one about mountain biking in Lochaber
3) Instead of linking to the video, which takes visitor off your site, why not embed the video in your web page?
The code to embed individual videos is displayed on the youtube page. See how easy it is to implement by pasting the following into Notepad and then saving it as a .html document: <object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/0NXy3s_I87M&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/0NXy3s_I87M&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>
Bear in mind when using video to warn users that your site is not responsible for external content and include credits where applicable. If presenting the content as a popup rather than a new window, remember to say so clearly or users won’t see anything if their popup blocker is switched on.
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