The 5th annual Traverse City Film Festival came to an end Sunday. Keeping with recent tradition, the crew here at Oneupweb took to the streets last week to capture the thoughts and feelings of anyone willing to let us point our cameras at them. The week was packed with interviews, pirates, cheerleaders, dogs, Sloth, and much more.
Here is the first of many videos to come from this year’s event…
So you might be thinking to yourself, “What’s the point of filming people on the street and posting those videos to YouTube?” Well I’m glad you asked (or is it thought?).
Oneupweb is from Traverse City. We live here, and we like it. So to help support our local events, we get involved and try to share some of that social media goodness that the world craves. So that explains our community service. But why did we choose video and YouTube? The answer is an important social media lesson – basic, but important.
Not every social channel is correct for every brand. I don’t think it would have made too much sense to choose to use Twitter for the Traverse City Film Festival, and nothing else. Just like it may not make sense for your company to be in MySpace if your target audience is business men (or women) 50+. So what’s the lesson? You need to do your research, build a strategy and then go with the tactics. In other words, don’t just jump into MySpace because social media sounds like something you should be doing (a kind of “everyone’s doing it” mentality), and you have an intern or someone who knows how to use MySpace. You need to do your research first!
So anyway, seeing as how this particular event happens to be a film festival, what better way to spread the word than to produce some digitized films and toss them on YouTube? (Okay, my editor just yelled at me. A lot more work, planning, behind-the-scenes stuff, integration of social media channels like Twitter and Facebook, and more strategy went into this than just “tossing” them on YouTube.)
“Will a few videos really do anything significant?” Absolutely. They’re an additional resource for potential tourists to view when picking that vacation destination. Sure they may not be viral, but as the collection grows a little each year they become more and more difficult to ignore. And who knows, maybe one will become viral someday (did you see our Madonna video?). And don’t forget, major search engines are now including videos in search results.
Be sure to check up on Oneupweb’s YouTube channel to see the latest footage as it’s released.
