A COLOURFUL shot of the St Patrick’s Day parade which looks more like Rio de Janeiro than O’Connell Street has been selected as the winner in an online competition which shows the power of “crowdsourcing”.
The photo of dancers in the parade by Julie Matkin, a Scot living in Dublin, was one of almost 8,000 uploaded to the official St Patrick’s Festival group on photo sharing site Pix.ie.
Marcus Mac Innes, founder of Pix.ie, says the St Patrick’s Festival is just the latest example of how the site’s infrastructure can be used as a marketing tool for events and brands.
Pix.ie partnered with the festival and encouraged everyone who attended any of the events to upload their photos. Almost 350 people joined the group on the site with more than 5,000 votes made on photos and 1,500 comments added.
Mr Mac Innes has organised similar photo pooling for O’Briens Sandwich Bars, Dún Laoghaire’s Festival of World Cultures and the most visited tourist attraction in the country – the Guinness Storehouse.
“The Guinness Storehouse gets a million visitors a year and they are all carrying cameras,” says Mr Mac Innes. “Normally they take their pictures and leave and Guinness never gets to see those pictures”.
Guinness teamed with Pix.ie to create a monthly photo competition which is promoted on the paper guides to the attraction. As a result, 1,300 people have joined the Storehouse group and uploaded over 5,000 photos.
“It enables Guinness to re-engage with all the people that are their customers,” says Mr Mac Innes. “Amazing things happen when you pool photos like this. There are seven stories in the Storehouse, so people typically miss things but the group allows people re-live the experience and see things they have missed.”
Launched in 2007, Pix.ie is a free service that allows people uopload and share their photographs online. Although it plans to develop a paid for premium service, it is currently supported by advertising and the money paid by businesses to engage in crowdsourcing projects.
“For us this helps get our brand out there and also generates revenue for the site,” says Mr McInnes. Julie Matkin’s winning photograph can be viewed and commented on at http://pix.ie/jodonnell/879064
