The rise of short videos such as Tik Tok has made citizens the main force in city image promotion.

Since the reform and opening up, in order to attract investment and tourists, all parts of the country have begun to intensively build city brands and spread city images. Nowadays, how to make your city become an explosive city like Xi ‘an in Tik Tok is a problem that many city managers think about.

On September 11th, Tik Tok, Headline Index and Urban Brand Research Office of Tsinghua University National Image Communication Research Center jointly released the White Paper on Short Video and Urban Image Research (hereinafter referred to as the White Paper). Based on nearly 80 million city image-related videos of 369 mainland cities in China, the white paper interprets the image construction of popular cities on the platform by analyzing the data such as broadcast volume, punching heat and watching behavior.

According to Tik Tok data, Chongqing, Xi ‘an and Chengdu, the three western cities, are the hottest cities in Tik Tok at present. Their popularity in Tik Tok has surpassed that of the North, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. These three cities are also the representatives of new first-tier cities in China. Among them, Chongqing is the most popular "City of Tik Tok", and the total broadcast volume of related videos has exceeded 10 billion.

As for the main body of communication, citizens have become the main force of city image communication, showing a new pattern of "the government sets up the stage and the people sing operas". The top 100 city image video creators with the highest broadcast volume have more than 80% personal accounts.

In this 52-page white paper, titanium media has been dismantled, combed and analyzed, and some wonderful discoveries and opinions have been excavated.

With the expansion of the main media from TV newspapers to websites and mobile information aggregation platforms, the spread of city image has also developed from the pre-mobile Internet stage to the mobile short video stage.

In the pre-mobile Internet stage, the city image was spread by the government as the main body. The government is the planner of city image, and the official media is the executor of city image communication. The public knows the image of the city through media reports and TV advertisements. During this period,The exposure of a city in mainstream media is the core index of city image communication.

A classic case is the urban tourism advertisement "Chengdu — — A city that you don’t want to leave when you come, takes a warm and common route and creates the image of a city as a "leisure capital", which has benefited Chengdu so far.

When the Internet spread to the mobile graphic stage, the official and folk discourse rights began to divide, and the city image cognition became polarized. During this period, in addition to the traditional media, the audience mainly paid attention to and subscribed to accounts or targeted information search. A number of WeChat official account, which focus on urban food, tourism and culture, also came into being.Reputation has become an important measure of city image communication at this stage.

During this period, most local accounts focusing on urban food, tourism and culture were only concerned by local people, and it was difficult to produce national influence; The negative events of city image, with the blessing of anger, break through the barriers between official folk discourses and realize occasional cross-channel network-wide communication.

With the expansion of the coverage of 4G and Wifi signals, short videos that tend to be fragmented have become a communication genre that fits users’ usage habits at this stage.The characteristics and individuality of the city image are gradually formed, and the recognition degree becomes a supplementary index of the city image.Accompanied by "Song of Xi ‘an People", Xi ‘an smashed a bowl of wine and became popular in Tik Tok. The Chongqing Liziba Light Rail Station, which passes through the building, has become a new popular punching place, and the Chongqing government has specially built a viewing platform for this purpose to facilitate users to shoot and punch in.

The white paper makes category statistics on the creators of Tik Tok city image videos, and finds that over 80% of the videos with TOP100 are created by individual users, and ordinary people become the main creators of city image videos on the vibrato platform.

Fan Hong, director of Tsinghua University National Image Communication Research Center, believes that,The rise of short video makes the city image communication transition from government-oriented propaganda to citizen-oriented spontaneous communication, from official discourse system to folk discourse system.The development of media technology has brought about the renewal of communication concepts, the reconstruction of organizational structure and process of communication, and triggered the transformation of urban communication.

In the short video stage of the mobile terminal, the government is the definer of the city image, the manufacturer and promoter of hot spots, and the masses participate in the creation of content related to the city image, which is the concrete expositor of the city image. How to use short video to spread the image of the city? We must first make clear the characteristics of popular cities and popular short videos.

Macroscopically, the spread of city image on short video platform has four main characteristics:

1. Urban distribution characteristics: There are "explosive cities", and the short video transmission of urban image has become the latest blue ocean;

2. Regional distribution characteristics: the video volume is evenly distributed in the east and west, and the central city is low;

3. Features of broadcast volume: the hub cities in the west jumped to the top of the broadcast volume, and the "new first-line" cities in the central and western regions rose;

4. Regional distribution characteristics of popular short videos: Three cities in the west account for 40% of popular videos, and small cities can also have "explosions".

Through the analysis of TOP100 city image videos, the content and disseminators of popular city image videos have the following characteristics:

1. Features of content form: videos of local food, scenic spots and the positive image of the government are easy to explode;

2. Content theme characteristics: hot topics are concentrated, and nearly half of popular videos participate in the Tik Tok platform challenge;

3. Creator’s characteristics: The government set up a stage, the people sang operas, and over 80% of the videos came from the personal creations of ordinary citizens.

To sum up, Beijing and Shanghai are ahead in the number of city image videos, while Chongqing and Xi ‘an are better in the total amount. Food and beautiful scenery are the most common contents of popular videos. Based on the macro and micro analysis of the video related to the city or city image on the short video platform, the white paper extracts a set of methodology for shooting the city image video — — BEST rule.

BEST is BGM— Urban music, Eating— Local diet, Scenery— Landscape, Technology— The facilities with a sense of science and technology, these four kinds of symbols that go deep into the capillaries of urban life constitute a three-dimensional city image, which makes the city symbols more recognizable.

The popularity of urban folk songs and the popularity of short videos are mutually successful, and the unity of sound and painting on the theme makes the image of the city stay in the memory of the audience for a long time. Song of Xi ‘an people is sung in dialect, and the audience is brainwashed by the "northwest flavor" of Xi ‘an, replacing the "ancient capital" and becoming a more grounded symbol of Xi ‘an city. Local food video photographers go deep into the city lanes to explore the "hidden food" of the city and make the image of the city more plain and vivid.　

Chongqing is a city with distinctive urban characteristics. The abstract city images such as mountain city, hot pot and beautiful women are deeply rooted in people’s hearts. In the TOP10 video of Chongqing city image broadcast by Tik Tok, "light rail passing through the building" and "I don’t know which floor I am on" reflect the characteristics of Chongqing’s mountain city; Hot pot and beautiful women embody the "hot" connotation of Chongqing. The figurative image of Chongqing is more differentiated.

In terms of communication influence, Tik Tok promotes the development of urban cultural tourism. During the Spring Festival holiday in 2018, Xi ‘an received more than 12.69 million tourists, up 66% year-on-year, and its tourism revenue exceeded 10.3 billion yuan, up 137% year-on-year. During the Dragon Boat Festival holiday in 2018, Hongyadong in Chongqing received more than 170,000 tourists, a year-on-year increase of 143%.

In addition to the specific shooting methods, the white paper also gives strategic suggestions on the overall marketing of Shanghai in Tik Tok. According to the white paper, the government is the definer of the city image. It needs to do a good job in top-level design, clarify the city positioning, strengthen the city characteristics, concentrate superior resources, attach importance to city management, encourage people to participate extensively, and provide materials, create opportunities and create hot spots for the spread of the city image on short video platforms from all aspects.

At the same time,The government should also conform to the new communication law of short videos, replace propaganda with dialogue in thinking, replace information output with story interest in content, replace retelling with deduction in narration, and replace horizontal screen with vertical screen in shooting habits.

Although short videos create a good opportunity for cross-cultural communication of city image, the white paper also suggests that cities need to examine their own conditions and identify whether it is necessary and feasible to conduct international communication. At present, there are three types of cities suitable for promoting international communication by using short videos: cities hosting international conferences, border cities along the Belt and Road, and cities with strong traditional culture in China.

It is also worth noting that, compared with the colorful city life and varied city images, the contents published in Tik Tok are still too simplistic, forming some relatively narrow definitions of city images. The platform has the responsibility and obligation to launch more and better challenges, attract and guide users to create and publish more beautiful, diverse and wonderful video images of urban life. (This article is the first titanium media, author/Li Chengcheng)