Several weeks ago, I was invited to participate in a public advisory committee meeting for a new startup here in the San Francisco area. The startup is called Zannel and focuses on aggregating photos and videos you take through your mobile device and displaying them in a central repository online – similar to Twitpic, but much more organized.
So what’s the benefit to you, the small business? I’ll tell you…but first a bit of a background on how I heard about them.
If you use Twitter, you know that you want to share photos with your entire Twitter followers and those following you. So you use your mobile device & take a picture. What’s the best way for you to share? Most of you will answer with the site Twitpic. I’ve used Twitpic in the past but apparently it never synched with my Twitter account so people never knew I was posting photos. During this time, I was at a Social Media Club event at the Zannel headquarters & spoke with their public relations person, Joann Peach and she gave me an introduction to what Zannel is. I thought it was something cool, but didn’t know the applicability so I essentially shrugged it off because I knew I was happy with the way I’ve been posting my photos & video. Unbenownst to me, I would soon eat my words and become a user of their product – much to my satisfaction.
Basically instead of simply posting photos, Zannel handles video as well and, well, even tweets. But here’s the thing that majorly separates it from Twitpic or yFrog is that it can post to several sites simultaneously, including, but not limited to: Twitter (of course), Flickr, Facebook, WordPress and Moveable Type. You can also create your own widget through Zannel that will allow you to display your photos/videos on other websites as you please. Another key thing is that you’re allowed to geo-tag your photos so people will know where the photo was taken.
But what about the advantages to small businesses? Imagine that you’re running a campaign and want to know about the awareness factor? You can have the public go around snapping photos of your traditional ads that may be running on bus shelters, street signs, doorways, alleyways, on buses, in newspapers, etc and upload them to a Zannel account. Then you could create a aggregate account on Zannel to pull in photos & videos from folks who tagged their content a certain way. Make it into a contest and you might get more participation.
Here’s an interesting example, check out what Zannel did during the 2009 Presidential Inauguration in Washington, DC. They had about nine contributors go around and snap photos of different galas and balls and the scene throughout the nation’s capital. This website is branded with the inauguration banner but this could also be your company or campaign as well so you can have your own page to control the content. Another example of what you can do is also apparent with the landing page for the Los Angeles Auto Show by Road & Track Magazine.
I would say that you should check out the usage of Zannel on any of your campaigns as that’ll help show some “accountability” and give a good measure of how people are paying attention to your campaigns, depending on what your overall goals are. It’s basically another social networking site so go ahead and sign up and interact with people on there. You may find a community interested in your product or industry. Reach out to them and you could potentially earn some evangelists too.
Let the adventure begin!
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