Vine and You

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So many people are jumping on the Vine bandwagon lately. Companies like Dunkin' Donuts are all seeing an untapped potential in using the platform for social media and marketing.

For those who don't know, Vine is Twitter's answer to video. Just as Twitter reduced text messaging to 140 characters, Vine reduces video communications to roughly six seconds. This is a great length to keep things interesting to the new generation of ADD consumers. My generation was known as the MTV generation because our attention spans were related to the quick edits seen in MTV music videos. The new generation, however, has an even shorter attention span. The new Twitter generation has replaced the MTV generation. One-hundred and forty characters and six-second videos are now the standard units of measurement when it comes to attention spans of the new consumers.

What makes Vine interesting? It evolves from two independent trends: people posting videos (and especially video responses) on social media sites, and animated GIFs (which have been around forever) all of a sudden becoming popular again. Vine combines these ideas: videos are the length of an average animated GIF and have a similar feel to them.

A friend of mine, Michael, did a video project last year. He recorded 20 seconds of video footage on his iPhone every day for a year. At the end, he put it together into a 122-minute montage of his year. He did this pre-Vine, but when Vine came out, it was clearly a tool he could have used to make his project easier to do.

Other than a fun social tool, it wasn't clear to me that businesses should really jump on the Vine bandwagon. But then a friend of mine told me he was at a restaurant sitting next to a 12-year-old boy who spent his dinner time creating Vines.

Companies like Dunkin' Donuts have been smart to use user-generated Vines as promotion tools and contests. Your company can also make Vines that can be used not only for marketing, but as "behind the scenes" clips of your company. This is a perfect pet project to give to some younger staffers in your company.

Are you using Vine? Do you plan to? Let me know in the comments.

Until next time...
Jack