The Next Phase of Travel Marketing

I recently came across TurnHere.com - a very cool website that has a compilation of short films about various locations across North America.  Unlike other video submission sites, the focus of Turn Here is about recruiting filmmakers into a professional community and allowing them to house their work in a more professional environment.  Better yet, Turn Here offers opportunities for filmmakers to join their database to get commercial work from local businesses.  I love this idea for a variety of reasons.  Firstly because the site is a hub for high production quality videos taking you into a neighborhood in a certain region.  There is not enough of this kind of content online, and I can imagine it could be hugely influential in helping travellers (and local people) to decide where to stay, where to eat, where to visit and just about anything else that the typical adventure seeking traveller would want to do. 

The site also offers a great network for filmmakers to create a strong personal brand for themselves.  There is a blog profiling filmmakers and many opportunities for potential clients to view information about filmmakers and choose one to work with.  Deliverables range from a 45 second produced piece on your business, to longer more involved advertorial style formats.  The end result is the ability for local businesses to recreate that dream TV media hit only a few are lucky to get from a travel-oriented show or talk show on network television.  For restaurants or hotels, TurnHere also represents a unique opportunity to market themselves in context of their location - and the site even features a cool mashup with Google maps so people can locate the places they see in the video on a map of the area.  Best of all, TurnHere understands the power of content syndication - offering multiple ways for people to reuse and promote their content.  If you have a local business, work in travel marketing, or you are an aspiring filmmaker ... make sure you check out TurnHere.