Page 268 - Foundations of Marketing

Digital Marketing and Social Networking | Chapter 9 235

rather than reactive. This means that while firms can promote their products through videos or
photos, they usually do not interact with consumers through personal messages or responses.
At the same time, the popularity of these sites provides the potential to reach a global audience
of consumers.
Photo-sharing sites allow users to upload and share their photos with the world. Well-
known photo-sharing sites include Flickr, Picasa, Shutterfly, Snapfish, and Instagram.
Flickr is owned by Yahoo! and is the most popular photo-sharing site on the Internet. A Flickr
user can upload images, edit them, classify the images, create photo albums, and share
photos or videos with friends without having to e-mail bulky image files or send pho-
tos through the mail. Yet while Flickr might be the most popular photo-sharing site on
the Internet, the mobile photo-sharing application Instagram has emerged as a competi-
tor. Instagram allows users to manipulate their photos with different tints and then share
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them with their friends. With more and more people using mobile apps or accessing the
Internet through their smartphones, the use of photo sharing through mobile devices is
likely to increase.
Other sites are emerging that take photo sharing to a new level. Pinterest is a photo-sharing
bulletin board site that combines photo sharing with elements of bookmarking and social
networking. Users can share photos and images among other Internet users, communicating
mostly through images that they “pin” to their boards. Other users can “repin” these images to
their boards, follow each other, “like” images, and make comments. Marketers have found that
an effective way of marketing through Pinterest is to post images conveying a certain emotion
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that represents their brand.
Photo sharing represents an opportunity for companies to market themselves visually by
displaying snapshots of company events, company staff, and/or company products. Nike,
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Audi, and MTV have all used Instagram in digital marketing campaigns. Whole Foods
has topic boards on Pinterest featuring recipes, farm scenes, and more to reinforce its brand
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image. Keller Williams has used Flickr to show photographs of employees performing
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philanthropic services in their communities, a type of cause-related marketing. Many busi-
nesses with photos on Flickr have a link connecting their Flickr photo streams to their cor-
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porate websites.
Another popular form of media sharing is video-sharing sites. These sites allow virtu-
ally anybody to upload videos, from professional marketers at Fortune 500 corporations to

© iStockPhoto.com Photo Sharing

Flickr is a very popular site that
allows photo and video sharing.

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