I attended the 2012 eTourism Africa summit in Cape Town last week and was reminded about how important it is to capitalise on trends and topics as soon as possible, to take opportunities before they pass by. I was also proud to see work done by Flow Communications being used as an example of this.
Damian Cook of eTourism Frontiers, spoke about how effective online videos can be in reaching a broad audience with minimal costs. He pointed out that the famous Battle at Kruger, which has been viewed more than 68 million times on YouTube, cost Kruger National Park absolutely nothing, but created massive international interest about the reserve.
Another example he used was the T-Mobile Royal Wedding video commercial that was only released online and has been viewed more than 26 million times on YouTube.
He then told the story of how the “Nek Minnit” video craze began. Levi Hawken, a New Zealand skateboarder, had his scooter stolen while he was enjoying a skating session. A reporter arrived to cover the story and did a video interview with Levi to find out what had happened. Watch this below to find out.
The video quickly went viral as people around found Levi’s summary highly amusing, particularly the way he pronounced “next minute” as “nek minute”. Numerous knock-off videos were made as people used the “nek minute” concept to depict how a story could be summarised in a few seconds, by using the shot of Levi saying “nek minute” to separate the beginning from the ending.
When Cook presented the “nek minute” craze at Indaba in Durban earlier this year, delegates loved it and Flow Communications thought it would be amusing to make a quick knock-off video about visiting South Africa, on behalf of South African Tourism. You can watch the video below.
At the eTourism Africa summit last week, Cook played this video and commended South African Tourism for compiling and publishing it within minutes of his presentation at Indaba, while delegates were still talking about how funny the concept was.