Editorial The ‘Big Data’ challenge: amplify your content using video and maximise your impact I t remains a great achievement for an author to have his or her work published in a peer-reviewed journal such as the BJUI. There is a tremendous sense of fulfilment when the e-mail from the Editor-in-Chief includes ‘accept’ in the subject heading. What may have been a long period from study design, through ethics approval, patient recruitment, intervention, data collection, statistical analysis, manuscript preparation, to final revisions, finally comes to an end – chapter closed, move on. However, in this era of ‘Big Data’, we are now confronted with new challenges with respect to getting our content noticed. It is estimated that of all the data created in the history of mankind, from early cave drawings to medieval manuscripts and modern web 2.0 communication, >90% has been created in the past 2 years alone [1]. Two thousand years ago, 90% of the world’s content was thought to be archived in just one place, the Library of Alexandria in Egypt, and all of that content would easily fit on a flash drive today. With this massive amount of new data emerging, the current challenge is not just to get published, but also to get your work noticed. This is where social media can help your content to rise above the morass and get into the mind of your target audience. At the BJUI, we have integrated social media into every aspect of the Journal [2], as it is clear that this is important for our readers [3]. The use of popular platforms, e.g. Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, as well as our own blog site, allows us to greatly amplify the reach of our content, at lightning speed, and allows us to engage with our readers in a way that traditional print publishing never could. In the video accompanying this editorial (http://www.bjuinternational .com/?p=14248), we offer some practical advice to help our authors create high-quality video to augment their content. This advice includes: • Capture at the highest quality possible – digital video recorders outperform DVDs and are essential for laparoscopic and robotic work. For open surgery, a GoPro is our preferred capture device but an iPhone can also provide good footage. • Editing brings the video to life: video editing software is widely available and can transform your video from a dull procession into a vivid story. Add in additional footage (e.g. operating room footage to go with your laparoscopic video), still pictures, graphs, imaging etc, and add titles to help illustrate your key messages. • Output for social – your video-editing software will allow you to export your movie in a format optimised for YouTube (e.g. FLV file), or to upload directly to YouTube. Or just export it in a high-quality format and we will upload toYouTube for you. We encourage the use of video to accompany any type of publication at BJUI, including web-only content such as blogs, and we require it for featured content such as the‘Article of theWeek’,‘Article of the Month and Step by Step articles’.Videos in a surgical specialty like urology are often focused on procedural technique, but they do not have to be this limited and we encourage all other types of BJUI content to also be supplemented with video. Our BJUI Tube site and YouTube site contain good examples of how authors can describe their content with video by using figures and tables in an interview-style format. This latest video addresses issues around the capture and editing of videos to optimally complement your published work. These videos are then disseminated to a wider audience through our large social media network. All of our videos are ≈3 min in duration, as our analytics demonstrate that viewers ‘switch off’ when videos run for much longer. We therefore encourage you to think social, think video, and help your content reach its maximum audience.We are here to help you! Conflict of Interest None declared. Declan G. Murphy* †‡ , Wouter Everaerts † and Stacy Loeb § *Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, University of Melbourne, † The Royal Melbourne Hospital, ‡ Epworth Prostate Centre, Epworth Hospital, Melbourne, Australia, and § New York University, New York, USA References 1 IBM. What is big data? 2013. Available at: http://www-01.ibm.com/ software/data/bigdata/what-is-big-data.html. Accessed April 2014 2 Murphy DG, Basto M. Social media @BJUIjournal – what a start! BJU Int 2013; 111: 1007–9 3 Loeb S, Bayne CE, Frey C et al. Use of social media in urology: data from the American Urological Association. BJU Int 2014; 113: 993–8 Supporting Information Additional Supporting Information may be found in the online version of this article: Video. © 2014 The Authors BJU International © 2014 BJU International | doi:10.1111/bju.12787 BJU Int 2014; 113: 843 Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. www.bjui.org wileyonlinelibrary.com