Flickr-fy Your Blogs and Tweets

Did you know that you can blog any public photo right from Flickr? Until very recently, I didn’t. Now I’m happily populating two personal blogs (Adriel Hampton and Travel Tokyo) and my Twitter account with fresh and archived shots from my photostream.
It’s dead simple to link your blogs and Twitter account to Flickr. One you do, it’s a few clicks to posting new content. Flickr’s blog integration allows you to write your blog or edit a tweet right from the site and the native formatting is sound.
Flickr supports:

• Atom Enabled Blogs
• Blogger
• LiveJournal
• Manila
• Meta Weblog API Enabled Blogs
• Movable Type
• Typepad
• Vox
• WordPress
• Twitter

Aside from fun personal use, this is a great tool for government communicators, as documenting events can quickly turn into a whole range of content for your social media efforts, from photo sets to a week’s worth of tweets to a great blog post with key context or the event press release. You can also use others’ photos to populate social media streams, just be sure to check for appropriate licensing.
I’d long used Flickr for research, and admired the work of many fine professional photographers. But it’s only upon recent experimentation that I realized how foundational it can be for social Web content creation efforts.
Dan Slee, a UK local government communicator and avid blogger and photographer, recently wrote a great post about 11 ways local government can use Flickr, calling it “a Cinderella social media platform without a Stephen Fry to champion it.”
Without a celebrity champion, Flickr’s great qualities are just going to have to stand for themselves. Check it out, and if you do, be sure to add me as a contact. I’d love to see what you’re up to.