I remember the course like it was yesterday, especially the lessons and exercises we went through to break out of traditional reading practices. One exercise had us turn the page upside down to open our minds to thinking of the words on the page not as linear text but rather as a whole picture. The logic was that when you look at a painting, you don't view it from upper left line by line to the bottom right; you look at it as a whole.

Even with a very quick glance of the picture, you are able to remember large amounts of what's in the image. Well, the same concept works for reading.

For me, this approach, which I found to be very effective, only underscores the nature of how our brains work.

Our Brain's Native Language

As a veteran communications professional, I have gravitated toward using images as much as possible in the materials that I create; it's only now that I'm finding various different reasons for why I felt it was the right way.

If our brains mash up the words coming in through our eyes or ears into pictures, then why don't we just communicate in pictures to begin with? Won't that be much easier for people to comprehend? Sure it is. Why else is the trend in technology and social media moving to visual communication?

YouTube, one of the most used search engines in the world, is the poster child for the importance of visual communications. According to YouTube statistics:

• 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
• More than 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month
• More than 4 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
• In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views, or around 140 views for every person on Earth.

When my 14-year-old son wants to learn a particularly difficult special effects edit in Final Cut Studio, he doesn't look at any manual or ask me for help; he performs a search on YouTube for that specific thing, finds a bunch of videos about it and teaches himself.

Related: Read Gilman's previous column “Beyond BYOD.”

It's also why just about every new social media platform or upgrade is focused on incorporating photos and/or videos. The latest is Vine by Twitter.

I Heard it Through the Grapevine

If you blinked recently, you probably missed this new social media tool. Appropriately, Twitter owns it and I say that because, like the 140-character, micro-blogging platform, Vine is a platform for 6-second video loops.

We've all read about how the average person's attention span has gotten shorter, but 6-second videos seem a bit crazy. What could you possibly communicate or care about in 6 seconds? We'll get there.

The Vine app, available only on the iPhone iOS platform at the time of this writing, is free and easy to use. When you first launch the app after setting up your account, it presents with a scroll of popular Vines with comments people have made below it. When you scroll across them as you reach the next Vine, it begins to play.
Vine automatically defaults to silent mode, whether on your mobile device or if you're checking them out on your computer. You need to manually turn the sound on in order to hear it.

Related: Read another column by Rick Gilman “Text Benefits.”

You can click on the “home” icon on the left corner to explore, find activity, or change your profile. Explore has a dozen different categories that are typical and I'm sure will expand as usage grows.

Shooting a Vine is very simple. You begin with the standard camera view in portrait mode and to begin recording, just touch and hold your finger on the screen. As long as you're touching the screen, the camera is recording up to a total of 6 seconds. The real creativity comes into play when you start and stop the recordings, much like stop-motion movies of Wes Anderson's 2009 “Fantastic Mr. Fox” or Nick Park's “Wallace and Gromit” series.

It's when you think of Vine in that manner that you realize the potential is much larger than just what 6 seconds infers. But what, if any, application is there of such a platform for insurance agents? As Shakespeare's Hamlet would say, “Aye, there's the rub.”

How Agents Can Use Vine

Well, I'm the first person to say that you don't have to jump on every new social media gizmo that comes along. If you did, you wouldn't have time to sell insurance. Vine is so new that it really hasn't made it around to much use in the business environment.

I have to believe that, just as when Twitter first came on the scene and businesses couldn't imagine how 140 characters could possibly have any place in their marketing strategy, creative insurance agents will figure out how to make 6 seconds of captivating video a part of their social media presence.

And if there isn't a direct business use for this tool, maybe it becomes just another way for agents to reach a different market with the value of insurance—such as 6-second loops of preparing your home for the coming storm, ending on a shot of your website or agency front door. Or maybe it's a 6-second montage of the different businesses you insure, featuring some local business clients.

Certainly anyone can use Vine to communicate short messages very creatively, then post to your agency Facebook page or sent out through Twitter.

Related: Read the column “Mobile Musts” by Rick Gilman.

Sometimes these new platforms aren't about communicating about insurance but rather about demonstrating visually who you are as a business within your community. What is your agency involved with locally? Do you support any local teams or volunteer for any causes? Share those activities, not just through photos posted to Facebook, but maybe try some simple Vine videos.

On the other hand, you could pass this one by and you' probably would be OK. I don't have to tell you that with limited resources, you need to pick and choose. While I'm having fun playing with Vine, we'll need to wait and see how it fares outside of personal use.

If you are using Vine even just to have fun, let me know. Send me your Vine profile ID so I can follow you. Mine is Rick Gilman, but I only have a few loops so far–mostly of my cats.