Development Seed Blog

Flickr's Release of "Find Your Friends" Allows Organizations to Build their Network Faster and Be Smarter Communicators

Now it's easy to find and talk to "your friends" on Flickr. On March 31st Flickr opened up a new tool that allows people search their Yahoo!, Gmail, and Hotmail address books to find Flickr users with those email addresses. This really blows open the communications windows for organizations that host photos on Flickr and have large email lists of friends and supporters.

Organizations can now build relationships on Flickr with the same
people they send emails and e-newsletters to. This is a big step. I
have seen and helped a lot of nonprofits start using Flickr as a
community outreach tool, but aside from staking a presence and
regularly posting photos that are integrated with blog posts,
communication directors haven't really known what to do with the
service.

All they have to do to further connect with these people - and engage in a two way dialog with them - is to do a large address book import in to Google from their mail program and go to work. It's that easy with a CSV file dump (Comma Separated Values), which Google supports.

Flickr has a ton of great communications features - like commenting on photos, tagging, friending, etc - that organizations and supporters can now use to simply talk to each other. For many organizations, this may well be the very first time they get to see the faces of their supporters. 

This is a great way for organizations to embrace pull style communications (i.e. let supporters pull in their pictures rather than always pushing them out to them). Who knows, maybe organizations will start subscribing in mass to their supporters' feeds to see what they're posting and glean information about them this way. It will give them a very personal window into their membership base. I think this is where the real magic will happen. Maybe even just doing some lightweight automated text analysis based on tags will generate some great information and low lying fruit. 

Whatever approach they take, the organizations that will benefit the most from a more active role on Flickr are ones that are already investing in photography and whose cause is made more compelling with photos (like environmental organization and local youth groups). They'll also be the ones that see Flickr as a place to generate conversations and connections around great photos. I have seen way to many organizations just dump a lot of sub quality pictures on their Flickr accounts without adding any details or meta data. That won't build community, and rarely will it help a cause. To use Flickr, like with any tool organizations will have to be smart about it. 

I experimented with the friends feature over the weekend, and it works great.  Most importantly, there is a good level of granular control to see who you should add and what category you want to assign to them (contact, friend, family, friend and family).