Is Vine becoming invincible?

 

  

Never heard about Vine? That is just about to change. Vine has in fact just topped the US App Store's list of free iPhone apps. This new mobile service acquired by Twitter lets users create and share short videos (from three to six seconds long), like a GIF or a looping video. The videos, which can be directly integrated into the tweets, automatically start playing and are muted by default.

The particularity of Vine is its recording technique: the app asks you to touch the screen to record, in order to make a kind of stop-motion video. Instead of a continuous six-second video, you can put several short shots together. But there are also limitations, you can't edit the video after you have recorded it and Twitter doesn't let users import videos taken or downloaded elsewhere. The most important restriction is that Vine is only available in the App Store for now, the Android version will come later.

 

Vine, which is originally a NYC startup, is not the pioneer of the short videos concept. Michael Downing has indeed launched a similar app, Tout, in April 2012, saying that some moments in life can't be explained by text. The Wall Street Journal has quickly understood the potential of shorts videos and is working with Tout to create a kind of blog. It's in fact a stream of reporter-generated videos called WorldStream.

Google is of course not missing out on short videos and has developed its own free app: Capture, which is only available for the iPhone. But what really makes Vine different is two major innovations : the possibility of stop-motion videos and the square format that seems perfectly suited to watch a video on a Smartphone.

Cats, porn and job opportunities

Vine, which could be described as the Instagram of video, has quickly become attractive for social networks' lovers. Only three weeks after the launch of the app in January, 100 000 videos were posting by users. It's a new means for people to share their lives and as usual, there are a lot of videos about food, funny cats or cute babies.

But Vine is also well-known for porn uploads and the blunder made by the staff in January : highlight porn in the "Editor's Picks" category. The most creative or interesting videos posted to Vine are usually selected by staff in this section. Twitter quickly removed the video and apologized saying it was a human error.  

 

But Vine can also be used for another kind of purpose: the research of job (yes, it's not all about food and porn). Dawn Siff, a former political director for Fox News Radio made what seems to be the first Vine resume: a six-second video where she describes some of her skills. The journalist quickly found a job at The Economist as project manager but she wrote on her Tumblr: "I actually got this job through old fashioned networking, a referral by a friend. But I would say that the Vine Resume did impress them once I was in the door."

 

Dream for marketing

Vine is definitely an opportunity for brands which can create shorts advertisements for free and share them with their social media fans. Like Todd Wasserman writes: "It's easy to see how the 6-second format could become a new standard for video ads, the way the 30-second ad has for TV." There are many possibilities but brands can use Vine to:

- Promote their products. For example, Malibu has made a short video to promote its drink during the period of the SuperBowl. It's obviously much cheaper than an ad on a TV channel which broadcasts the game. Trident has taken advantages of the looping video, showing a gum pack and writing "The never-ending pack!".
 

 

- Interact with the followers and potentially consumers. This the case of the Rolling Stones Magazine for example which masks its cover with post-it and asks "Guess who is on the cover". It gives the feeling of a close relationship between the brand and the consumer and it's a way to get users' feedback easily.

 

- Encourage followers to produce content. And consequently advertisement for the brand for free. For example Martini asks users to share the "Martini moments" on Vine. Contests are also organized: the Cavendish London hotel offered an overnight stay at the hotel for the most romantic Vine video with the hashtag #ValentineVine to @Cavenish_Hotel. 

 

 

 

"I miss my pre-internet brain"

According to Henry Jenkins, "Convergence Culture maps a new territory: where old and new media intersect, where grassroots and corporate media collide, where the power of the media producer and the power of the consumer interact in unpredictable ways." Vine and other short videos apps are, as we have seen with Tout and The Wall Street Journal for instance, examples of interaction between old and new media. The film maker James Mangold has even used Vine to make a teaser of "The Wolverine", the last X-men film. Of course Vine could not be successful without massive participation of the users. The simplicity of Vine makes video crowdsourcing a real viability for brands and companies are wised to co-construct the story they want to tell with consumers.

 

Dom Hofmann, the general manager of Vine, said: "Posts on Vine are about abbreviation – the shortened form of something larger. They’re little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life." But we have to think about this word, abbreviation. With Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and now with Vine, are we moving to a "fast-food culture"? A culture where the information is fast-produced, fast-assimilated and badly digested?

With short formats like 140 characters or 6 seconds you don't have time for developments, explications or contextualization. The message is brief and to the point. Some of us don't read newspapers articles anymore but tweets or don't write full sentences but hashtags. Obviously we have to put things into perspectives, some tweets include a link to direct the reader to leading articles for example. And it reminds us the potential and the richness of media collaboration.


Laurence Donis