I want to thank Troy Thompson from Travel2.0 for a recent post where he highlights this YouTube campaign for Leavenworth, WA as one of his favorite uses of Social Media for tourism marketing. Before I begin to wax Piratic over this, let’s dive right in and have you watch it first. Then me lads, I’ll tell you why I am so impressed:
It’s hard enough to get tourism destinations to leverage YouTube as a channel for highlighting their video assets. Some will cobble together some in-house clips of b-roll and post them up on their channel. I suppose that’s better than nothing. But the folks from Leavenworth have gone beyond that. They have invested in a story. An elaborate story, featuring a nutcracker named Woody Goomsba. One thing recurring theme I agree with Troy and the Travel2.0 folks on: story first, tools later. YouTube is just the social media tool here. This video would not have 185,000 plus views if it wasn’t a good story. I urge you to also view the behind the scenes video that shows the making of this. Notice the news clips of PR this video generated for Leavenworth. Notice the production values that went into shooting this. So if you are a destination marketing organization, are you investing in the story, or spending too much time messing around with the tools? Top shelf, Leavenworth. The Captain is a fan.