A good post from and ex colleague Geoff on the opportunities for Brands on Flickr has preempted something I was going to write on the same subject, but it’s interesting to see that Geoff came at it from a different, perhaps more positive attitude. I’ve long used Flickr as a gauge to research peoples perception of a particular brand. There’s no real technique to this, you just enter the Brand Name as a Flickr search and see what comes up…. simple.
A recent bad experience with Carphone Warehouse, that I’ll write up when I have time, got me to searching Flickr to find some images of a store that I could use in a PowerPoint deck… what I found however were lots of images tagged ‘carphone warehouse’ a bit like this:
Something to do with their Christmas Ball or whatever. As Geoff rightly points out, the amount of traffic Flickr gets, aside fro perhaps Google images, it’s pretty much THE image database of the Internet. What interests me, is not the opportunities as outlined by Geoff which are all valid and spot on, but how do Brands deal with the stuff they can’t, or perhaps can control? Do Brands need to consider what they allow their employees to publish in what is essentially their name?
Hi Nathan,
Very interesting point. I think the employees posting is a bit of a curveball, and it will be interesting to see in the years that come how companies deal with the increasing public transparency of their employees.
Rather than policing directly, it may lie somewhere in the same solution I’d suggest to dealing with brand haters. Basically, if people are likely to talk negatively about your brand in any public space, short of the ideal solution of fixing why they are talking negatively about you in the first place, the next best solution is to try and contribute something positive yourself to the mix to help balance things out.
This is not to say brands should be spamming social spaces, as that’s obviously adding fuel to the fire. But as an easy example, GM proactively mobilizing their Flickr audience to post photos of cars and tag them, and GM doing this themselves via the photostream, helps ensure that searches for GM are going to result in mostly a lot of cool car photos.
Want a tough challenge though and a good example of a brand with an image problem on Flickr? Try searching for “Microsoft”:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=microsoft&w=all
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