Sharing your community–photos tell a story
I’ll be heading up to Prescott for the Arizona Association of REALTOR’s Winter Conference next week, and am really looking forward to it. And of course, I’ll have a camera or two or three. (Funny how every piece of technology now has a camera, isn’t it?)
When I go to an event in my community or off to a conference, I often share my photos a couple different ways. Three of the easiest ways that I’ve found are with Twitpic, Facebook, and Flickr.
Twitpic
With Twitpic, I take a photo with my phone and then email it to a special email address that was assigned to me with I created my account. The text I type into the subject line, along with the photo, are posted to both Twitpic and Twitter almost immediately.
The Tweet looks like this:
And, the link goes to this:
While you can post to Facebook from your phone, I prefer to upload photos from my computer. It gives me a chance to edit and improve the photos first. With the longer shelf life, I like to have a higher quality picture available.
With Facebook, I can upload a single picture to my wall:
Or, upload many photos to an album:
Either way, the photos give me the opportunity to tell a story, share an insight, and connect with my Facebook friends.
One very important note about photographs published on Facebook, from their Terms of Service, most recently updated on 10/4/10:
For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”).
Another important point about photographs on your personal Facebook page:
You will not use your personal profile for your own commercial gain (such as selling your status update to an advertiser).
Use your Facebook business page for sharing your real estate related information.
Flickr
Flicker is a social networking site that attracts amateur, budding, and serious photographers. You can upload and license your photographs in a number of variations, from All Rights Reserved to Creative Commons with no restrictions.
I found Flickr as a solution for finding Creative Commons work that I could use on my blog. Over time, I started taking my own photographs and uploading them. I found that by tagging each photo, other bloggers from around the world were using my photos and giving me credit for the work by linking back to my Flickr account. Flickr has an internal messaging system and an active social group too. Flickr’s terms of service do restrict commercial use of the site ( i.e. Don’t use Flickr to sell), but do have Best Practices for how businesses can use Flickr to showcase their work.
I put some of my better photographs on Flickr, and group them by subject, and locate them geographically on the Flickr map. Over time, these photos on Flickr really begin to tell a story about the community I live in.
The old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words” really is true. Use your photos to tell a story of your life, your work, and your community.
Look for photo updates from next week’s AAR Winter Conference. I plan to post in all three locations. I do hope you can join us.
And please, share here with us, by commenting below. Tell us the web sites you post your photos to, and please contact me directly with links to your AAR Winter Conference photos, so I can share them here next week.