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 Spark.<\/p>\r\n
Spark helped Flickr position its new product as a mix between social networking, blogging, and photo sharing, and labeled it as a trend toward “innovation in combination.” Spark isolated Flickr’s most innovative product feature—tagging—and leveraged it to demonstrate Flickr’s unique approach to photo organization and sharing. This provided Flickr with an opportunity to highlight its other tagging applications, lead trend stories, and assume pioneer status.<\/p>\r\n
Spark secured hundreds of marquee placements in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Associated Press, along with tagging-specific stories featured in BusinessWeek, Associated Press, WIRED, and PC Magazine. Overall, Spark’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, and in 2005, Yahoo! acquired Flickr. By September 2010, Flickr reported that it was hosting over 5 billion images.<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/div>"}}