Using Flickr to Tell UM-Flint’s Story with Photos

Photos. University Relations has a ton of them. Photos taken by professional photographers for marketing materials, photos taken at events for the news site, Facebook, or Twitter. Photos sent to us from all over campus. MediaBin, UM-Flint’s online photo library, is full of pre-approved images for use by faculty, staff, and students in print and on the web.

Until now, however, nothing has been in place to share photos socially. University Relations is not the only department on campus taking great photos. Beyond that, the best images of the University of Michigan-Flint can come from anywhere and anyone. We want those images, too.

While pulling elements together for the recently launched UM-Flint Social page, I did some searching on Flickr, a photo sharing site, to see if there was user-generated content already out there worth including in our social stream. Boy, was there! My search for the tag “umflint” yielded over 2,000 results. I quickly determined that Flickr was worth paying attention to.

UM-Flint Social is all about pulling together UM-Flint’s voices to tell a complete story. Now, by including images from Flickr, that story can also be told with photos. The screenshot below shows the Flickr tab of UM-Flint Social. Any image tagged “umflint” on Flickr appears in this feed.

You can also now find the University of Michigan-Flint on Flickr. Look here for photos from campus events, photo shoots, and more.

Alaina Wiens