FreshNetworks Blog

We’re halfway through our series highlighting ten ways of getting insight from online communities. We’ve looked already at ways of making the most of the profiling data, conversations, language people use, and ratings. In this post, we’re going to look at how allowing (and even encouraging) photo uploads can be a real source of insight in your online community.

Many online communities are very text-based. They are based on conversations, and the forum is the central area of the community where most activity takes place. But given the increasingly media-rich nature of the Internet, this is something of a shame. Some people just don’t express themselves as well in words as they do in other media. Sometimes a photo can convey an opinion or start a discussion. And sometimes a collection of photos allow people to work together on a problem, issue or problem.

You can get real insight from allowing people to upload photos, and even more from encouraging them. Hotel reviews on TripAdvisor are significantly more meaningful when you have visitor photos to accompany their reviews. If your online community was about a product or service, then finding out how people actually use it would be of real use – photos of where they store your product in their kitchen for example would give you a real insight into peoples’ lives. A community for a holiday firm could get real insight from photos of guests on holiday. A community about home improvement could be much more powerful with photos of peoples’ rooms or houses. In fact pretty much any community could benefit from photos.

There are really three levels of insight you can get from photos:

1. Understanding why people choose to upload the photos – what photos do they upload? Are some users more likely to upload photos than others? Do the photos that are currently in the gallery influence the photos people upload? Understanding these motivations gives you insight into your community members.
2. Analysing what people upload photos of – if you run a community for a holiday firm do people usually upload photos of people, the accommodation, the weather or the scenery? This probably gives you a real insight into what they associated with their holiday. People are going to upload photos that they feel reflects the aim or objective of the online community. Analysing what photos they choose to upload will give you real insight into their attitude towards the issue.
3. Observing what reaction the photos get – do people discuss photos that are uploaded? Do they post photos in response to those already on the site or is each photo upload a fairly extant experience? Are the community members using the photos to tell a story or solve a problem together or is each using it to illustrate their own point.

A photo upload is a source of lots of insight. Into the community member and the community as a whole. Into what they think about the subject or issue at the heart of the online community. Into what their real lives are like.

Photos can, of course, give you more insight. If you encourage and allow comments and voting on photos you can get much more insight. We’ll be talking about this in the next instalment of getting insight from online communities.

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Some more reading

• Social Media: it’s bigger than you might think (freshnetworks.com)
• The Ad Man Answers #53 (mjroseblog.typepad.com)
• Traditional media is spreading community messages (freshnetworks.com)