The Flickr Phenomenon :User Generated Content/Asset Strategy

Caterina Fake & Stewart Butterfield, Founders of Flickr.com tell Fastompany,Flickr has grown from 0 to 150,000 users while still in beta and with zero dollars ($0.00) in marketing investment. This growth has been entirely organic, based on word of mouth, blog postings and positive press. We have quickly created the largest and best-organized online photo library in existence with 1.8 million images, of which 81% are public, and 85% have some human added metadata. What this means is you can find photographs of anything that strikes your fancy. Vintage cars, butterflies, Parisian graffiti, Halloween costumes – you can get lost for hours exploring Flickr. Flickr has also provided a place for people to both express themselves and be a part of a larger community by creating self-organizing photo albums that they can share privately with friends or family, or with the world; they can curate collections of other member photos, and create dynamically assembled galleries. People all over the world upload photos from the war in Iraq, from the middle of the Florida hurricanes, from the polling booth, from the midst of the revolution in the Ukraine. Flickr is infinitely shareable and easily searchable. As Paul Allen points out, Fastest Growth Sites Are Built on User Generated Content. Paul writes,one of the most powerful ways to develop web site traffic is to enable users to share their content through your web site with others-to create community around user generated content.Many of the fastest growing web sites of all time did this (or do it now): MyFamily.com, eBay, GeoCities, Xoom, Homestead, MySpace, Epinions, Hotshots, LinkedIn.com, Meetup.com, Friendster, and more.If sites are uses to get customers to blog, use message boards, upload photos or reviews, the effect shall be dazzling.With open source software (for message boards, blogs, uploading photos, and more) and with the cost of hard drive storage a tiny fraction of what it was five years ago, the time has never been better to try a user generated content strategy.