The economics blog in The Economist carries a post entitled “praise of laziness”. The main thrust of the rumination was that “businesspeople would be better off if they did less and thought more” as there are too “many distractions and interruptions, too many things done for the sake of form, and altogether too much busy-ness.”
The biggest villain behind the frenetic pace that has overtaken workers both at home and work being email as apparently 80% of workers surveyed “continue to work after leaving the office, 69% cannot go to bed without checking their inbox and 38% routinely check their work e-mails at the dinner table.” All of this apparently leads to less not more productivity.
Business folks apparently are not sold on the foregoing idea as most seem intent on taking on even more “distractions”. That seems clear from the alacrity with which the latest fleeting visual effect by a start-up from last year named Vine is being embraced in a variety of fields.
Late last month CNN Money carried a report on Twitter’s recent acquisition of Vine, a company which initially set out to be a mini-video sharing application for everyday users but quickly gained traction with advertisers for content marketing and brand promotion on account of its rapidly ramped up user base of over 13 million spread around the world.
Available as an app either for the iPhone or an Android via Google Play, the app purports to enable users to “see and share life in motion. Create short, beautiful, looping videos in a simple and fun way for your friends and family to see.” Brands have quickly gotten into the act with more than a couple of running promos in an attempt to convey their “human element” among customers by creating stories that make them interesting and compelling to the general public.
Appropos the above, AdWeek reports on how the faux hospitality company, Airbnb is running a contest called “Hollywood & Vines” which “aims to create a short film composed of six-second videos submitted by consumers online”. The company used its Twitter account to solicit clips from followers with each request including directions for a specific shot. The first, for example, was “a paper airplane flies thru diverse landscapes, left to right. Show the best parts of where you live!” The second was “a paper airplane flies thru an urban area. It barely misses people on busy streets.
The company hopes to compile the best of the submissions and then show the final montage online and on TV as well as on the Sundance Channel with the final form being a story about travel and adventure. While Vine looks like it is all set to add “visual bite” to the marketing lexicon it is unclear if like its aural cousin it will really lead to better brand penetration.
Vine is a brand new platform and users as well as brands are still working out how they can bring it into content marketing strategies. It definitely has a human element. There’s an opportunity to show yourself and your voice, which connects people to you on a relationship level. Whether the short videos can do more for promotion is yet to be seen – but I am interested in seeing AirBnB’s video! It sounds like fun!