A Note About Vimeo.

The last social networking site The Old Lookout seems to make use of is the video sharing website Vimeo. In previous years this account was used to host the short films made by film-makers in residence, which were shot on a weekly basis to give an impression of each exhibition that had been in the gallery. Unfortunately, this year we haven't been able to make film about every single exhibition, which means that the account has not been used to upload many videos recently. For this reason, I am not going to look into the use of this website in as much detail as those we use more often, rather just note down a few of my thoughts on how Vimeo is being used.

• At the moment, our account is only really used as a place to host videos online, not to interact with the public or other artists and galleries who make sue of it. There are lots of videos on the page, but The Old Lookout is not following any other accounts, hasn't liked any videos etc. It is used purely as a hosting platform, not to make connections with others. 
• At the moment, it seems as though we are paying for Vimeo Plus, which offers more benefits then just the basic user account. There are other options for video hosting sites, the largest of which is of course YouTube. The benefits of using YouTube over Vimeo could be access to larger audience, better and more often used search features and free usage. However, it is definitely not as slick an operating system as Vimeo, which also looks much more professional when videos are embedded into other web pages, such as our twitter page or main website.
• Very few independent galleries that I have found use a vimeo account, or even make videos for promotion. This does act as a unique selling point of The Old Lookout, and provides a really slick and compact way to get information about what we do here across to potential visitors. However, The Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate, although on a much larger scale than the Lookout, do also make videos to create a buzz around their exhibitions and upload them to their Vimeo account.
  The short films they post are not actually much different from the ones we make here, with interviews and footage providing a bit of background information to the exhibitions they have on at the time. They do also use it to interact with other users much more, liking videos and following other accounts. Obviously, I recognise that the Turner are on a much, much larger scale, but I do feel that finding another gallery that makes use of this site in a very positive way is encouraging.
• The videos that are on The Old Lookout's channel have plenty of artistic worth in their own right and provide a really good way to represent the gallery positively. These short films are a lovely, unique way to show work that is done at the Lookout, and do deserve to shown off to the world. They are a huge strength to us not only in terms of publicity to the public, but also for funding bids and so on.
• I don't feel that is really worth ploughing lots and lots of time and money into our presence on Vimeo, given that it is mainly used for hosting the videos and embedding them into other pages. It's also not actually posted on very often. However, I think it is entirely necessary to have a place to house the films about the gallery, given that they are so artistically strong.

Overall, I do feel that our presence on Vimeo is perhaps not as strong as it could be in terms of using it for publicity. However, I think that it does the job that we need it to do perfectly well as it is. We don't really need to use Vimeo as a social networking site, given that videos can be linked in to both Facebook and Twitter anyway. Therefore, sticking with using the account as a slick and professional place for us to direct people if they want to see the short films I feel is a perfectly valid and appropriate use of this online tool. Our presence here probably could be improved, but I honestly don't think it needs to be. Let's stick to what we know and let the films do the talking.