While the last thing this country, businesses or individuals need is to buy more stuff with fake money – yes, I mean credit (hee hee) – American Express, in a smart attempt to get people to do exactly that, have started a useful business community called Open Forum where you can find marketing, technology and other business tips. All snarky comments aside, Open Forum does provide some great info from leading industry experts. I like this article in particular on using Flickr to promote your business, and the fact that it emphasizes the need for high-quality submissions.

Flickr is not just a community of photos, it is a community where high quality photography is appreciated. Sure, people use Flickr to share their point and shoot photos with family, but the power users of Flickr and the communities that you would care about as a marketer are usually looking at very high quality images.

For this reason, Flickr is not a place for marketing spammers and has remained largely free from spam, unlike other social networks.

Obviously it lends itself to businesses with a strong visual component, but if you attend a lot of events and can provide high quality, well-annotated & described photos for public use (using the Creative Commons licenses), there’s an opportunity for bloggers and others to use them if they are writing about that event and need some visuals.

One thing the article doesn’t mention is that you can provide a description with each photo, which can include links, so it’s a good opportunity to provide useful info and drive a little traffic.

Read the full article here:
How to Promote Your Business on Flickr : Marketing :: American Express OPEN Forum.

Sadly I’m not particularly handy with a camera, but if I were, perhaps I would take interesting portraits of my clients and (with their permission of course) post them to Flickr – helping promote them and myself indirectly.

What other creative ways can you think of to utilize Flickr to market your business?