Public Services Lab Blog

Reaching new audiences with photos online

Robin Hamman - 04.02.2009

How the Big Green Challengers, Finalists and other groups can use photographs to tell their story and reach out to new audiences.

In this post, the second in a series about getting the most out of using social media, I'll discuss a few of the different ways the Big Green Challengers, Finalists and other groups can use photographs to tell their story and reach out to new audiences.

Most people building a website would upload their pages and images directly to their web host. When people visit those pages, the images, along with text and any other content, is displayed. The problem with this approach is that the only people who will see those images are those who already know about the website, probably because they are familiar with the organisation or individual behind it. There is another way which, through the clever use of social media, can help you gain more from posting your images online.

Photo sharing websites such as flickr, picasa, photobucket and smugmug (to name a few) allow people to upload, store, share, describe, discuss and sometimes print digital images. Each of these services has large audiences of people actively seeking out photographs for information, fun, or personal or professional re-use. By posting your images here, then embedding them in your own website, you're potentially getting your image - and through it your ideas, message or organisation - in front of a whole new audience.

So here's the technique:

1. choose and register for a photo-sharing website
2. upload your photograph to that site
3. describe your images properly using titles, descriptions and tags (tags are words or phrases that tell other people what subjects or themes your content relates to)
4. make sure you put a link back to the related content page on your website
5. copy the embed code, which you'll usually find next to or below the image on most photo-sharing websites (although on flickr you need to go to the All Sizes tab above the photo), and paste it into the html source code of your blog post or web page

Last weekend, I was in Brecon Beacons running a social media workshop with the Big Green Challenge Finalists there.

With any luck, at least a few of the people who search for photos of Brecon Beacons, Wales or any of the other tags I've used to describe the photo on flickr, will stumble across my photo, want to know more, and click the link. If just one of those visitors - people who are unlikely to have any previous contact with me or the Big Green Challenge - decides they like what they see here, is encouraged to learn more, and perhaps even joins the efforts of the communities, then the very minimal additional effort required to go about posting images in this way will have been well spent.

In the coming weeks, I'll be offering further advice and step-by-step instructions to help you make the most of social media tools and services to tell your story, share knowledge, engage with stakeholders, and reach out to new supporters. In the next post, the third in this series, I'll show you how to build google maps and geo-tag your photos and other content.