Tap Into the Flickrgeist

Consumers are replacing Consumer Reports. We are increasingly turning to blogs and other forms of consumer generated media to gather the information we need to make informed purchasing decisions. Armed with these insights, we can easily separate exceptionally great products that our fellow consumers truly love and are evangelizing from those that are just average.

Consumers can do this today with more than blogs by tapping into what I call the Flickrgeist. And, thanks to RSS, as a marketer you can easily monitor your company/product's Flickrgeist index against your competitors.

In case you're not familiar with the site, Flickr is a free photo sharing site that anyone can use to post photographs and then "tag" them with certain labels. Flickr makes it a snap to find all photos across its vast community that have posted photos under a common tag. Each tag has its own RSS feed.

Using Flickr tags, you can assess just how much consumers are evangelizing brands by stacking them against their competitors. All you need to do is simply replace the bracketed text below with the the name of your product and enter the URL into your browser...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/[product name]

Here's a sampling of head-to-head results I tested...

Yahoo - 410 photos
Google - 342 photos
MSN - 96 photos

iPod - 824 photos
iRiver - 4 photos

Treo - 1698 photos
Blackberry - 34 photos

The moral of the story is, if you're a marketer don't just monitor blogs. Pictures are worth a thousand words. Tap into the power of the Flickrgeist! You know your savvy customers will.

Comments

[Matthew Oliphant]

Great idea, Steve.

Though I'd point out that while a picture is worth 1000 words, you can't be sure you and the person next to you would use the same 1000 words.

Data mining like this, you have to remember it is just data. iPod may be tagged 820 times more than iRiver, but that doesn't mean anything until you start to look at the content of the pictures. You have to ask what caused these people to choose their tags, and what that might mean.

And what that may mean brings us back to the use of your 1000 word limit. The information I glean from 828 photos may not be what someone else would glean from them.

[Niall Cook]

To illustrate Matthew's point, just look at the pictures tagged with "treo" (http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/treo/).

On that first page of pictures, I see a couple of iPods, a Robosapien, and other random shots.

My guess is they've been tagged "treo" not because of the content, but because of the device used to capture the content!

So I would amend your advice, Steve, to caveat that it won't work for manufacturers of digital cameras or camera phones.

Regards, N

[Zes]

It's a good idea until they get swamped with massive amounts of unstructured data. Look at the tag for 2004 -- 119,175 photos. Or the tag for Apple? You get everything from the fruit to Apple Computer to the apple of my eye. That isn't useful data, not good for sarching, not good for market research.

Louis Rosenfeld has a good log on the problem's with Flickr's tags:

http://louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/000330.html

[gary]

As a librarian, I agree with Zes's post 100%.

It's not that the idea of using tags is a bad idea, descriptors are very useful for precise research, but creating and maintaining vocabs is not as easy as it looks. Here are a just a FEW examples of possible problems:

+ Scalability. Zes also mentions this.

+ Synonyms, Regionalisms, etc.
Simply put, you call is soda I call it pop. If contolled vocabs are designed to bring like things together, lack of control is going to cause a mess.

+ Definitions
What precisely does Treo mean? Scope notes (what a tradional controlled vocabs often have) are unavailable. Niall's example is excellent. Does Treo mean pictures of Treo's or images taken by Treo cameras. Here's the Flickr category for Dell. What does this exactly mean? Dell Computers? Dell Computer users? My friend Sam Dell? Maybe, but if this is the case, lots of non-computer related pictures.

What about hot dogs?
Does this mean people who like to show off, the foodstuff, canines who are warm? Look at the results. I'm trying to figure it out?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/hotdogs/

+ Are terms being correctly applied. What about spam?Spammers could easily start mistagging items into more popular categories. How is this going to be different than what happened with the abuse of the meta-keyword tags in the early days of web search.

[Ken Leebow]

You might want to try a quick search at www.Webshots.com -- over 70-million photos.