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Image Hosting Websites

Even in the information age, word of mouth remains our number one source of new customers. It’s just that now, this word tends to be spread electronically. Nothing facilitates that better than digital imagery.

Digital cameras and camcorders make it easier than ever to capture memories of every class, trip, event and activity you run. And, when your customers can easily access and share these images with friends and families…well, guess what? Now their friends and families will want to become your customers, too.

What this means is that not only should you be shooting lots of stills (or video) of these events, you also need a fast and easy way to share these images with customers.

DiveRetailing.com’s parent company, Sinulogic, sends out monthly eNewsletters for a variety of clients, including several dive stores. Recently (almost as an afterthought), we started adding links to photos from our client’s most recent classes and trips as part of these mailings.

We assumed, going in, that these links would be followed by no more than the handful of people who actually took part in that class or trip. Imagine our shock, then, when we discovered these links were out pulling all other stories in these newsletters by a factor of more than two to one!

People love sharing pictures of themselves, their friends or families doing fun and interesting things. E-mail and social networking websites make this easier to do than ever. When you make such images readily available to customers, you get them to harness the power of the Internet on your behalf. This is word-of-mouth on steroids.

• Your store may already have an image-hosting site built into or linked to your existing website. If so, great!

• If you don’t have such a site — or if the site or application you have doesn’t facilitate image hosting (or is too labor intensive) — you need to get one.

There are several free or low-cost options available, such as PhotoBucket and ImageShack. The one our clients use most often is Yahoo’s Flickr. A basic Flickr account is free; we recommend spending the extra $24.95/year to upgrade to the Pro version, which gives you nearly limitless uploads and affords even greater control.

Among the many benefits of using a service such as Flickr is that it greatly streamlines the process of sharing large numbers of digital images. You can download a special application from the Flickr website that allows you to organize and label images off line, then upload them as a batch. Resizing images is automatic (which saves considerable time and requires no use of image-editing software).

When you upload images to Flickr, they become part of a Photostream — a large batch of photos that are not necessarily organized in any particular manner, other than by date of upload. Fortunately, Flickr allows you to group photos into sets and collections.

• A set is a related group of photos, typically from a particular event or activity, such as The Past Weekend’s Open Water Training Dives or This Month’s Florida Keys Trip.

• A collection is a group of sets, such as Classes, Trips or Activities.

Click on the browser tab in which you earlier opened the sample website. Find the top-level navigation links and right click on the last link, Images, to open it in a new tab. See what happens.

With the price of point-and-shoot digital cameras so low, and housings being available for as little as $200, you should have at least one store camera system and encourage staff members to acquire their own. Make it clear to instructors and trip leaders that part of their responsibilities is to acquire as many digital images as possible of the store-sponsored events they lead.

You should also make it clear to staff members that their responsibilities don’t end until these images are uploaded to the store’s image-hosting site — preferably the next day.

While you can embed photos in your blog postings and add them to your Facebook page, neither will be as easy or effective as using a service such as Flickr. Make this type of application your primary means of sharing images and use your blog and Facebook to link to it.

You will also want a prominent link on your website that points to your image-hosting site. If using Flickr, make sure this points to your Collections page, as shown in our example website.

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