#miaitalia, Instagram and the power of community

Jul 22, 2011 by Dirk Singer

I love Instagram.   It’s the social network I now check 1st every day – ahead of Twitter (Facebook was never part of my routine), and it is one reason why I tweet, and also blog, less (bye bye Peerindex score!).

Instead, I spend a lot of time looking through people’s visual life streams on Instagram, and put up a fair few (mediocre) posts myself.

In fact, with me making an effort over the past few days to finally get to grips with Google+, my whole social media diet has changed over the past two months.

Why do I like Instagram so much?  I’ve never been much of a photographer, but I’ll link back to two contemporaries from the UK social media village, who put it better than I can:

As Katie Moffat says in a post, it is actually as much about the community than the pictures. And I am with Will McInness in that it reminds me of an early Twitter….just much richer.

I also like the fact that though some members of the social media marketing community are here, Instagram isn’t exclusively filled with the usual suspects – those of us from ad and PR-land.

As a result, I was thrilled when the bmibaby team at Rabbit got the airline’s Instagram feed up and running and rolled out a promotion that actually gets bmibaby interacting with the IG community.   Sure, other airlines like British Airways and easyJet already had feeds, so bmibaby wasn’t the 1st.

But despite travel being very visual, the industry hasn’t caught up with the fashion sector in the way Instagram is being used.   Check out for example asos (which has linked Instagram to its Facebook page), Burberry and (Rabbit client) Kookai.

Getting back to bmibaby, what the bmibaby Rabbits did was this.  They launched a competition to promote European routes, starting with Italy.

So far so good.  But, instead of releasing the competition out into the wild and asking IG-ers to tag their pics, the team worked with the very active community of Instagrammer groups.

For those who don’t know, there are 94 100 Instagrammer groups worldwide, from Australia to Venezuela.  This 1st bmibaby competition was launched with IgersItalia.   Since the competition went live, just over 24 hours ago, 632 photos (many of them truly amazing) have been posted with the hashtag #miaitalia (my Italy), showing what can happen when you get a community on side.

Yes, Instagram is an iPhone app, but many IG-ers also share with Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook, and that’s been the case here.

And there is more.   bmibaby will be working with other Instagrammer groups across Europe in similar promotions, and the results of this Italian competition will feed into a crowd-sourced guide to Italy – an album of Italian inspiration populated by Instagrammers.

Now…this blog is meant to be about stats.  If I want to write about Instagram I’d better find some Instagram-related research.   Maybe that can be the challenge for the next post!

(Update – Look who joined Instagram this evening.  Uh-oh…)

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