Flickr – a photo sharing network – is an effective community development tool for websites. I couldn’t run Cape Town Tourism’s blog, for example, without Flickr. We have grown an active and involved Cape Town Tourism community over the past year through the Cape Town. Live it. Love it. group on Flickr, which now has 467 members.
One of our most popular features on the Cape Town blog is our Flickr pic of the day, where we feature a Flickr photograph taken in Cape Town or the surrounding area each day, along with a few words from the photographer. It is largely through this feature that we have grown our community, which ranges from excellent professional photographers to enthusiastic amateur photographers sharing their holiday snaps. This is the beauty of Flickr – there is something for everyone.
We have run a number of successful photographic competitions through Flickr, with entries from around the world pouring in. These competitions were particularly successful as they were run in conjunction with other social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.
Other Flow clients who use Flickr successfully (usually through a dedicated Flickr group and related Flickr feed on their websites) are the Archival Platform, a heritage non-governmental organisation, specialist business insurer Etana Insurance, and Maropeng, the official visitor centre of the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site.