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.
Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.
He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.
