Business Photo Sharing: Flicker and Other Sites, Intro, Video and Links

What is business photo sharing? What is Flickr? “Photo sharing is the publishing or transfer of a user’s digital photos online, thus enabling the user to share them with others (whether publicly or privately).”  (Wikipedia)   Flickr is one example.

And here’s a short but charming video that explains the concept:  Online Photo Sharing in Plain English

Benefits of Business Photo Sharing

1.  Gives a human face to your enterprise

2.  Allows you to connect to, and interact with, current and potential customers, both in notes on pictures and in groups.  Topical groups have discussion forums.

3.  Provides links back to your website and blogs, which builds traffic

4.  Creates content and visuals to integrate into your website, blogs and social networks.

5.  Create maps for your website or blog by tagging pictures with zips or addresses.

Get Started Links:

Newbie’s Guide to Flickr Webware

What Does Flickr for Business Look Like?

Small Business SEM on Flickr

Cupcakes Take The Cake on Flickr

Chicago’s Alhambra Cafe on Flickr

Local Tourist on Flickr pictures from activities around Chicago

Headstand Media on Flickr pictures from its evening seminars

Pacetat sells a temporary race “tatoo”.  Pacetat customers are on Flickr.

Limits on Commercial Use

You can’t directly sell things on Flickr.  You can’t make it a product catalog.  You can’t fill descriptions with website links.  While I could find no official rules, one writer in the user forum explained:

*  The rule of thumb is that you can have one link on your profile page to a commercial webpage.
*  You cannot have tags, descriptions, titles or comments that indicate that an item is for sale or where to buy it.
*  Having a watermark across the image that is a commercial URL has also cause accounts to get in trouble.
*  In addition, if your account is predominantly commercially-oriented images, and gives the impression of being an online catalog, you may find the account deleted.

You can, of course, link to a blog which then links to your site and products.  Think about building a community that shares and comments on photos, not direct promotion.

 

Photo Sharing Websites, one of which is Flickr.

Store, Tag and Print: 10 Great Photo Sharing Services

Wikipedia list of Photo-Sharing Websites

More Info on Business Photo Sharing:

Comprehensive Guide for Using Flickr for Traffing Building and Brand Marketing

Picture This, Part 1:  Get the Most From Universal Search ClickZ  (How to name your pictures to get them picked up by search engines)

Picture This, Part 2:   For Pics and Clicks, Go SMO ClickZ

How Nonprofits Can Get the Most out of Flickr:  Tips for using the online photo-sharing community successfully TechSoup

Maps and Geotagging on Flickr

Using Flickr For Marketing Video from SageRock

Peg’s Flickr and photo sharing links on Delicious

Serious Image Formatting and Manipulation

Graphics for the Internet Media College

A Few Good Photo Manipulation Tools Ideaware

Flickr Addons

Great Flickr Tool Collection

Peg’s Experience

I took last Sunday to explore Flickr for SCORE Chicago, as background for this post. The further I get into it, the more marketing possibilities I see.  SCORE Chicago Flicker Sets

How my client Zanda Panda might use Flickr 

Zanda Panda sells bakeware, and I already helped Sandra pitch her product to journalists. Cakes are fun and visual, there are thousands of cake pics on Flickr.  I checked for cake and baking groups, and they also are numerous.  Cake Fun example. Doing searches for cake pans and cake moulds, I see others have uploaded such pictures.  Bundt pans, anyone? Shouldn’t Zanda Panda start connecting with all these folks, leaving comments on their pics, visiting and interacting in discussion groups, getting product ideas, maybe run a “most unusual cake” contest?  

Are you using Flickr to interact with your customers?  Should you be?  Leave me a comment.

PS. Are you doing business photo sharing, with a page on Flickr?  Then please add me as a Contact (i.e., friend me.)  Here’s how:  Click on my Icon ( that small square box with the dot eyes and line mouth) next to SCORE Chicago’s Photostream and you will see a dropdown arrow.  Click it and you will be asked, “Add SCORE Chicago as a contact?”

Related posts: Meta Post on 18 Online Marketing Techniques for more Web 2.0 marketing techniques

Don’t miss its Youtube and Video Sharing for Business: Intro, Video and Links

See all my Delicious links on Flickr