Is There a Local Angle for Vine?
Twitter’s Vine is blowing up for its ability to shoot quick and easy videos. Smartphone saturation and wireless broadband also make it an opportune time. And people are getting creative with the 6 second format.
The ease of use makes me think that we’ll soon see a blooming of vine-type video content in lots of different categories (comedy, adventure sports, etc.). It’s already happening and one place where it seems particularly conducive is local – especially A&E categories like restaurants.
People already love taking pictures of food — 60% of Yelp’s photo uploads are from mobile not surprisingly. And there’s the smaller but more engaged Foodspotting audience. Video is simply the next step in this social phenomenon, and again the macro-factors are lining up nicely.
In addition to the UGC angle, the question is how local businesses (brand and SMB) harness this activity in their marketing. That could involve capturing videos via hashtag and retweeting, or redistributing through their other channels. Geo-tagging is still developing at Twitter.
As it often goes, this will catch on at the brand level first. I’m picturing something similar to what Taco Bell did with Instagram. There are branding implications for Vine videos (some good, some potentially bad) for creative social campaigns, and possible SEO benefits.
On the SMB front, the question is how local media companies build products that help them get there. Few SMBs will do it on their own. Look for Foursquare to integrate Vine as its Explore tab continues to evolve, and as the company tries to prove itself as a local discovery engine.
But the real opportunity is for Yelp, given that profile-based local discovery is fitting for multimedia. That’s especially true in its leading category of restaurants as noted. An underutilized features of Yelp’s Enhanced Profiles — it’s leading source of revenue — is multimedia slide shows.
Look for Yelp to develop Vine-like video capability soon. This will equip users to capture sights and sounds, thereby creating a library of 1). points of user engagement 2). monetizable moments. For the latter, SMBs can redistribute or emphasize video within their Yelp profiles (paid feature).
There are lots of ways this could play out but i’m expecting Yelp to either partner, build or acquire something soon that brings low-barrier viral video production into the fold.
