It was only a matter of time before travel companies realised the massive Instagram community could be useful with promotions and getting content for websites.
One such outfit is European airline BMIBaby, which has spent the past few months working with thousands of Instagram users to create its website destination guides.
The idea is quite simple: interact with 170 of the so-called Instagramer groups (collections of like-minded snappers around the world) and persuade them to tag their photos with the name of the destination.
The photos are then added to any of the 39 destination guides on the airline’s website, giving visitors a range of images taken by other users.
Instagram, for the uninitiated, is a online photo sharing service which uses various filters to turn even the weakest photograph into a more palatable (and quite often, pro-looking) image.
One of the first was a collection for Italy, all masterminded and aggregated using the #miaitalia hashtag on Instagram…
In just a month, over 3,000 photos were submitted to the site, with a public vote launched to let users decide on the best image. The winner received a free pair of flights to Italy.
The success of the Italy pilot prompted the airline to carry out similar competitions in a string of other countries, including Germany and Holland. Switzerland is next, the airline says.
An interesting aside to the initiative is a programme to fly various Instagrammers to other so-called Instameet around Europe (informal meet-ups).
Once again, during the get-together, attendees were asked to their tag images. The first event in London and second in Venice yielded a further 1,200 images for the website.
While BMIBaby has headed down the route of capturing content for its website, Air France has this week also muscled in on the Instagram craze, launching a competition for passengers to take a unique picture that best represents the airline, using the tagging function within the platform to aggregate all the entries.
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About Kevin May
I wonder how they get round the Instagram terms of use to publish pics on their site. Any idea Kevin?
The announcement from bmibaby said “at the end of the month as a thank you too (sic) all entrants, bmibaby will produce a fantastic guide to Italy using everybody’s pictures”
Very nice. But who has the copyright?
Here’s the Italy pics:
http://blog.bmibaby.com/instagallery/italy-destination-guide/
No obvious attribution there.
I found a case study about the comp from the agency involved but nothing about rights there
http://goo.gl/8drCz
Hi Neil,
Thanks for your interest in the bmibaby Instagram campaign.
For most Instagram promotions, users label their photos with a designated competition hash-tag. Pictures are then pulled in by using the Instagram API.
This is what bmibaby did, and as Kevin writes, this is what Air France is also currently doing. For Italy for example, pictures using the specific hashtag #miaitalia (rather than general pics labelled Venice, Italy etc) formed the basis of the campaign.
When launching the campaign, bmibaby was up front about how the photos would be used and most users see it as a positive, as opposed to a negative, to have their images get wider exposure.
If however anyone is unhappy about this, then it is easy enough to untag photos
Regards, Dirk Singer
(from Rabbit – bmibaby’s social media agency)
Thanks for responding Dirk
I am curious about how you cleared it with Intsagram to use the photos on bmibaby.
Does Instagram not have any rights to the images?
Presumably the photos have to be removed from Instagram’s servers to be used, otherwise you would be using their bandwidth and at th emercy of their service staying up.
Was there any commercial arrangement with Instagram?
Sorry, just trying to understand
Cheers
Neil
Dirk:
Congratulations on identifying Instagram as the hot app in which to promote your client with…
In case you missed it today: Apple Picks Instagram As The “iPhone App Of The Year”
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/08/apple-picks-instagram-as-the-iphone-app-of-the-year/
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