Pioneering The Tagging Revolution
Today, “tagging” is part of our digital lexicon, thanks in large part to Flickr. But when the online photo sharing site wanted to launch this innovative idea to the world, it needed an equally innovative public relations strategy to communicate a concept no one had heard of. Enter Sparkpr.
Start With What People Know
First, Sparkpr identified familiar product categories that Flickr is related to, like social networking, blogging and photo sharing. We used this strategy to explain how Flickr borrowed from those categories to create its new product, labeling it as a trend toward “innovation in combination.”
Drive The Trend
Flickr’s most innovative product feature—tagging—was isolated and leveraged to demonstrate Flickr’s unique approach to photo organization and sharing. This provided Flickr with the huge opportunity to highlight other tagging applications, lead trend stories and assume pioneer status.
From Pioneer To Phenomenon
Sparkpr secured hundreds of marquee placements in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Associated Press, plus tagging-specific stories featured in BusinessWeek, Associated Press, WIRED, and PC Magazine.
Overall, Sparkpr’s successful strategies helped make tagging an Internet search phenomenon and increased Flickr’s user base from under 100,000 members to over 660,000 in eight months. In 2005, Flickr was acquired by Yahoo! and in September 2010, it reported that it was hosting more than 5 billion images.
