#DoItForTheVine - how an onion turbocharged ABC News Digital’s short video strategy
By Leonard King, Production Specialist, News Digital.
On Friday the 13th of March, the Prime Minister ate an onion, skin and all, while visiting a Tasmanian onion farm. You may have heard of this.
Thanks to the quick thinking of the Hobart newsroom and strategic planning by News Digital in Brisbane, a six second video of the PM’s onion bite was posted on social video sharing site Vine.
That evening the video was being shared on social media and talked about in pubs and clubs around the country. It seemed silly, pointless, even a little disheartening it had become so popular. It also led the news agenda throughout the weekend.
The following day, The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald embedded the ABC Vine in their online articles, then led their bulletins with that story through the weekend. By Monday, the Internet had seen all manner of onion-related stories;
· “Tony Abbott shocks as he eats a raw onion whole” (The Age)
· “Stop Everything And Watch This Vine Of Tony Abbott Biting Into A F…..g Onion With The F…..g Skin On” (Junkee.com)
· “Onions v apples: the definitive taste test” (The Guardian)
· “Ten times politicians ate something weirder than Tony Abbott's raw onion” (SMH)
· “16 Onion Recipes That Will Make It Your New Favourite Ingredient” (Buzzfeed Australia)
The Vine was also embedded in major publications around the world, including the US, UK and Germany, and even spawned its own mashup meme with the trance epic Sandstorm.
#Onion was the top trending topic on Twitter for most of the weekend.
A slow news weekend? No doubt. A fascination with the banal? Possibly. People not taking politics seriously? Well, that’s where it gets muddy.
The following week Onions Australia delivered a gift basket to the PM to thank him for the boom in interest that came as a result of the event (during which Mr Abbott bit into another onion). There were attempts to leverage it as the new “Ice bucket challenge”, and for a while #PMOnionChallenge was getting social and mainstream media traction. There was much discussion from both sides of politics as to whether the PM’s actions were a stunt, a genuine connection with rural Australia, or, as one site put it, if we’d “finally broken him”. Along with the banal and the silly, there was legitimate debate about the incident and how it fitted into the political landscape in Canberra.
Meanwhile, the Vine that triggered all this reached 1 million views, or “loops” as they’re known on Vine, by Friday night. By Monday it had reached 3 million, and it is currently sitting at over 4.7 million loops, while not appearing to be stopping any time soon.
The “Onion Vine”, as it’s now come to be known, triggered something in the Australian public. After months of rumblings of a leadership spill, poor poll results and a St. Patrick’s day video released earlier that morning that already had social media scratching their collective heads, the sight of the PM biting into a raw onion, skin and all, for no apparent reason became one of those “what on earth did I just watch?” moments that needed repeat viewings.
Related: Annabel Crabb writes - “Why I can’t forget the way Tony Abbott ate that raw onion.”
Last year we launched the ABC News Vine account after targeting short form, highly shareable video content as a priority. This works in conjunction with other digital video output channels, including YouTube, iView and the ABC News website. It is not meant to be a replacement for these other channels, but instead works alongside them, with different content optimised and distributed on the platform that best suits it.
In this instance, it was a great example of when preparation meets opportunity. The news crew knew they had something special and got it back to base and into the system quickly. The digital producer saw the potential, but wasn’t sure of the best way to treat it. They alerted the Brisbane News Digital video team member and had the raw footage syndicated to Brisbane as a matter of urgency. Brisbane determined the content’s best use was as a Vine, used the workflow locally developed for this kind of production and promoted it on Twitter and Facebook. And people, it seemed, couldn’t get enough of it.
But why Vine? Why a mobile-native application with limited output options that’s more known for things like this?
Here’s some figures.
1. Number of Vine users – more than 40 million worldwide
2. Vine loops watched daily – more than 1.5 billion
3. Vines shared every minute – more than 8000
4. Videos uploaded every day – 12 million (average)
5. Largest age group among Vine users – 18-20 years old[1]
6. Percentage increase in Vine usage among global teens (16-19) between Jan-Sept 2013 – 639%[2]
7. Average tweets per second containing a Vine link – 5
Those fifth and sixth points are the main ones I want to target. It’s true that a lot of the interaction on the Vines we post consists of comments like “So sad OMG” and “Ha ha ha ha lol”, but we also get comments from young Vine users like this one:
When the ABC News Facebook page reached 1 million subscribers, Social Media coordinator Gary Kemble wrote;
“(The) underlying philosophy has remained the same: to provide a useful, entertaining source of news… without feeling the need to drive people back to the ABC News website.”
Vine is known for moments – it’s about telling a compelling story in a short time, and as we all know, news is full of those moments. If anything, Vine is purpose built for news, if it’s used properly. Unfortunately a lot of news outlets seem to use Vine purely as a promotional tool to bring users to the TV, or, increasingly, Snapchat. That’s not how we’re treating Vine.
Our goal with short video is to be a source of News content in young people’s Vine and Twitter feeds, without trying to hit them over the head that they need to visit a website and get us metrics in exchange.
A lot of these people may not know Julie Bishop from Bronwyn Bishop, but if they see the Foreign Minister do a facepalm while the Treasurer is talking in Parliament; it triggers the question “I wonder what that was about?” Our goal, as always, is to be the trusted News source Australians turn to when they want to know what’s happening around the world, in Australia, or in their street. On Vine that means we engage with the commenters, where appropriate, to provide further details. On a larger scale that means we’re also there for them if they want to check their Facebook feed, come to our website, switch on the radio or turn on the television.
Since our first Vine in June last year, the ABC Vine account tipped over 10 million loops as a result of the Onion Vine. In the month since, with increased exposure and new strategies, we’ve reached 20 million loops and 15,000 followers, far more than any other Australian media outlet.
Not bad for a six second video of a prime minister eating an onion.
[1] http://adage.com/images/bin/ppt/ShortFormVideo_Jan2014.ppsx
[2] http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/vine-statistics/1/
