Buzz Marketing with Blogs: Flickr Fights Bad Buzz with a Blog

Flickr Fights Bad Buzz with a Blog

Flickr, a photo sharing and community site, has been messing up one of the most basic things a photo site needs to do: allow people to upload pictures. But by taking using blogs to their advantage and defusing the potential negative publicity of outside blogs, they’re managing to keep bad publicity to a minimum.

Flickr, a photo sharing and community site, has been messing up one of the most basic things a photo site needs to do: allow people to upload pictures.

How have they managed, so far, to keep bad publicity to a minimum?

Flickr has carefully decided to keep their service in “beta”—this helps lower user expectations.

They have site forums, and the staff actively participates there, not only answering problems, but just generally joining into the conversation. So they have a personal relationship with many of their most active users, instead of being a distant, imperious photo landlord.

Flickr established (late, but it was still a good idea) an official thread for all uploading complaints. Anyone can read it. This makes a client feel better to think that there’s an “official” forum where they’re being heard. It’s better to have people vent on your own site, than on dozens of personal blogs. (The top result for flickr upload trouble or problem is Flickr’s own site.)

And by channelling the complaints, Flickr has a chance to respond and evaluate the mood of each complainer, keeping their enemies close, so to speak. Besides, once people have vented once, they may be less likely to go vent somewhere else, like to friends or the press.

Thirdly, Flickr established a blog themselves, (set up on typepad, separate from any outages their own servers might suddenly suffer). On it, they’ve gone into great detail about their existing setup, and what steps are being taken to solve these “growing pains.” So clients feel like something’s being done.

Lastly, they’ve given at least some paying members a credit to make up for the problems:

Hi [user name removed]!

I’m writing to tell you that we’ve given you another month
of Flickr Pro (free!) due to the flakiness of Flickr’s
uploading system in the past few weeks. We know it was
frustrating for you and we feel your pain!

We’re working on some long term improvements on the
uploading process, which you’ll be seeing shortly. Thanks
for your patience, and thanks for supporting Flickr through
our beta testing period.

- CoreyFlickr (on behalf of the Flickr team)

That’s not a blogging-related solution, but it’s still a great pro-active measure.

Ultimately, Flickr needs to fix this problem to avoid losing their users. But by taking these steps—using blogs to their advantage and defusing the potential negative publicity of outside blogs—they’re managing to keep bad publicity to a minimum.

Proof of this: the harshest word in the official complaint forum is “peeved”!

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 01/19 at 01:49 PM • Blogs and Business

Comments

The Flickr upload problems have produced some happy accidents, for instance, I got an accidental warhol of a cat picture. Which you can see at my URL.

Having worked at an ISP during the Spam Wars I have some idea of what they are going through.
(although being too popular is the kind of problem many companies would like to have).

Posted by Larry on 01/20/05 at 06:33 PM
Really great summary of Flickr’s prolific service. I am just waiting on the sidelines until they are bought out by a larger corporation. I wonder which one that might be . . .

Posted by Joao Paglione on 01/23/05 at 05:47 AM