The Food Babe
Food blogger and activist, Vani Hari, writes for her own blog, foodbabe.com, where she discusses food policy, writes recipes and provides healthy lifestyle tips.
Hari updates her site frequently with content (usually a few times a week) – using mostly text and photography in her blog posts. Video is less common, but she has experimented with it intermittently. Prior to her hiring me, she’d uploaded 12 videos to her website, averaging about 4,500 views/video. Some of them are recordings of Hari’s guest appearances on news programs. The rest she produced herself and were shot on low end, consumer grade video cameras featuring no more than one or two shots edited together.
Adding High Quality Video and Storytelling to the Mix
In addition to her blogging career, Hari was also a North Carolina delegate at the 2012 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Charlotte. While she was carrying out her formal obligations during the convention, she also advocated for food policy reform, pressuring lawmakers to endorse legislation that would require food companies to label genetically modified organisms (GMO) on their packaging. To tell this story, she volunteered to allow a cinematographer to follow her around during the DNC to document her experience, and she hired me to assist in the development of the storyline and script as well as edit the footage to create her own video.
The narrative for the video included her experience at the DNC as well as a call to action for viewers to become involved in food advocacy, specifically by voting for or supporting Proposition 37 in California – a bill that would have required California food producers to label GMOs. She posted the video along with an article she wrote and photographs that she took at the DNC in a blog post titled “The United State of GMOs.”
Results
Because she already had a large following online, it wasn’t a surprise that the video quickly gained many views soon after she posted it. Less expected was how well the blog post (as a whole) would perform. The page (with the written article, photographs and video) has been “liked” over 4,000 times on Facebook – becoming one of the most popular posts on her blog. At the posting of this article, the video has 133 likes on YouTube – more than all of her other uploaded videos combined – and has been viewed 8,627 times.
Obviously a large part of the blog post’s success was because of Hari’s hard work building her audience. However, that it performed so much better than many of her other articles can be directly attributed to integrating high quality video production and storytelling into her presentation. The video is still on Hari’s homepage and continues to get steady views.