'Net Features : image tagging

Extend Image Value by Tagging with Rich Content

Michael Garrity — Thu, 09 May 2013 18:11:00 GMT

Image tagging is a popular new way to make pictures on a website more informative and engaging for users.

Now, website owners and designers can bring that engagement to their own images with the iPicture jQuery plugin that allows users to create interactive image walkthroughs that use the pictures already one their websites.

iPicture makes it incredibly easy to overlay little tooltips and hints on top of the image, which will appear to viewers as small circles with a + sign in the middle (see image below). When users scroll over these icons, they’ll see additional information that comes in the form of various types of rich content, such as HTML, photos or even videos.

The plugin is easy to integrate into a website and can be customized and extended using CSS. Even the individual tooltip icons, themselves, can be altered to match the look and feel of a site.

Unleash the Power of In-Image Commerce with Stipple Shopping

Michael Garrity — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 17:25:00 GMT

With image-based content becoming one of the staple’s of a good Web marketing strategy these days, publishers and merchants, alike, have been looking for new ways to monetize their pictures.

The popular image tagging service Stipple has launched a new service that takes image monetization to the next level by allowing customers to make purchases from directly within an image with the Stipple Shopping enhancement. Now, customers can comparison shop and purchase products in-image, which saves consumers from having to discontinue their purchases or conduct laborious tasks like opening another window or re-directing.

By making it possible for shoppers to explore, compare and purchase products on social media sites and elsewhere across the Web, Stipple Shopping allows merchants to offer up a holistic experience that brings “key components of online shopping” into images and in-stream on sites like Twitter, Facebook and other leading online publishers.

Most importantly, though, is that Stipple Shopping will give consumers the chance to explore multiple product views, colors, demo videos and more. Plus, they can look at similar and suggested products and conduct purchase transactions all from within a tagged image.

Brands can leverage Stipple’s technology to share “an array of interactive content” in their relevant images. This can include real-time pricing and product information, videos and photos, among many other things. Merchants can also regularly update information by adding new videos that will be updated online everywhere the photo exists.

Stipple Shopping even allows brands to retain full control of the payment process to help make shoppers feel more secure when making purchases.

The Stipple Effect and the Growth of Image Tagging

Michael Garrity — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 18:45:00 GMT

Image tagging services make it possible for content publishers to monetize their pictures by making them more interactive, and as social media sites like Pinterest and Facebook make it increasingly easier to share images across the Web, marketers are growing more interested in finding ways to advertise or even sell products from inside their photos.

Stipple is the industry leader in image tagging, boasting a roster of major clients that includes Zappos, Nike, Nordstrom and L’Oreal. It’s also the only service that has been able to accurately tag images at the enterprise scale without relying on gimmicks. Currently, the company estimates that it will have tagged and made “monetize-able” over 100 million images with 100 percent accuracy by the end of 2012.

This extreme growth hasn’t gone unnoticed, and just yesterday it was announced that Stipple had received an additional $3 million in funding from Sands Capital in order to “accelerate its growth and product innovation.”

Just last month, Stipple was responsible for tagging an impressive 12 million images, but that would quickly be overshadowed, as now the company is on pace to tag over 80 million photos by the end of December. When asked about what has helped propel this surge in image tags over the last year, CEO Rey Flemings said the company’s success was all about providing its clients with the ability to scale to tag a lot of photos accurately so that those tags follow the images as they get shared across the Web. Moreover, it doesn’t hurt that Stipple is the only image tagging service to have attempted (and succeeded at) such a feat.

“At the end of the day, the challenge isn’t in helping people tag photos,” says Flemings. “It’s all about distribution.”

As part of the company’s push for greater distribution, it recently integrated with Twitter to bring its interactive images to the social network’s content stream, which could be one of the first steps towards unlocking in-stream commerce on Twitter.

Much of Stipple’s success can, and has, been attributed to its ability to scale to meet the image tagging needs of all of its clients. When the company launched, it wanted to help “solve the image problem,” and now it has done that for some of the largest brands in the world. Some of its clients have thousands, if not millions, of images that need to be tagged, and Stipple is able to help them do that not just with a streamlined, automatic process, but also with 100 percent accuracy across distribution channels, which his of utmost importance considering how often images are shared on the Web.

“[Stipple] builds a bridge between our product images on others’ websites and our own, with no human interaction, unprecedented accuracy and at scale,” says Greg Colando, President of FLOR.

Now with a significantly fatter wallet, Stipple is looking ahead to 2013 and hoping to build upon, and increase, its impressive numbers from 2012. That means growing its current database of images and expanding its client base to include even more enterprise-level brands. It also means hiring more staff members, particularly engineers and sales representatives. That is on top of the two big hires the company just announced: Darr Gerscovich (formerly of LinkedIn and Yahoo!), who will run Stipple’s marketing organization, and Stephanie Palmer, who will be in charge of working directly with the company’s growing network of publishers.

It seems safe to say that affiliates and advertisers may want to keep an eye on Stipple in 2013, particularly if they’re looking for a way to turn their images into money. And who wouldn’t like to do that, right?

Turn Your Pics Into Profits

Michael Garrity — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 19:06:00 GMT

Images are all the rage on the Web these days. This trend was probably inevitable, as it is an easy way for publishers, bloggers and marketers to satiate the desire of the average Internet user with quick bursts of content that can be easily digested and then set aside, while still spreading their message.

The problem with images is that once they’re out there, the average Web professional doesn't know how to maximize their potential. However, the ability to make images more engaging and interactive, and eventually maybe even monetize them, is one that is the focus of many industrious developers, and the result is a number of solutions aimed at helping publishers and marketers make the most of their image-based content.

The basic premise of these various solutions is the same; publishers can add tags or “hotspots” to one of their images, which means they select a certain part (or parts) of the picture, and then when users scroll over the picture, these areas are highlighted. When the user clicks on these tags in the image, they’re provided with additional content related to the picture. This can include everything from other relevant images to links to text to audio or visual content and beyond.

For publishers and marketers, these solutions present great opportunities to increase engagement (and thus interest) in their images, inspiring users to stop and interact with the picture, rather than just look at it and move on. Plus, these images can easily be shared on social networks like Twitter and Facebook to extend their reach – some of the products even come with social sharing tags. But they also offer more than just general engagement; customers can also utilize these as an e-commerce and advertising tool that can directly translate into cold, hard digital cash.

By making images “shoppable,” users are able to click on the tags and be sent directly to a site where they can buy the product shown in the picture. Or, customers can link to products with their own affiliate links. Either way, when users click the link to the product, it will send them directly to the product page on the retailer’s e-commerce site, and that allows publishers to get paid in the same manner they would for posting affiliate links in other types of content.

If you’re interested in making your image content more engaging – and profitable – check out one of these solutions:

Luminate allows publishers to use images to engage their audience, add incremental revenue, improve session times and increase traffic, while advertisers can drive relevance, provide a focused brand message and engage consumers. Users can add “positional sharing” apps that let users choose a “specific point” on an image, comment on it and then share it on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. It also has an app that lets consumers browse and purchase products similar to those showcased in the image, and an Amazon Music app that lets them preview the music of the artist in a picture. It also comes with apps for YouTube Trailers, Netflix Videos, Wikipedia and much more.

Taggstar increases engagement with photos by an average of 40 percent and lets users earn money with e-commerce integration. Plus, it features robust analytics that provide real-time insights about how many and which people are looking at the pictures, and the images will remain trackable and monetized even when they’re embedded from the customer’s site to another one. And best of all, it’s totally free.

Thinglink works on a variety of popular website and blogging platforms, including WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Drupal, Joomla and others. Users can add media tags from a number of platforms, such as huge names like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Spotify, SoundCloud, Wikipedia, iTunes and Vimeo. There’s also integration with MailChimp for email campaigns, Etsy for displaying craft products, Eventbrite for promoting events, Best Buy and eBay for linking to products and more. And with Thinglink, users are able to import images from Flickr or Facebook, upload them from their hard drive or even copy the URLs of images from the Web.

Stipple lets publishers connect images via URLs, their websites or blogs, social networks like Facebook and Instagram or their online stores, and they can also upload them directly from their hard drives. Then, they tag those images with videos, other images, product links, locations, social media profiles, audio, notes or links. Stipple tracks the image to show the user where it “travels” to and how many people interact with it, providing them with the most accurate view of the picture’s reach and engagement numbers, including what content inside the image fosters the most interaction.

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but thanks to the Internet (and these tools), it could end up being worth a thousand bucks, too. So, if you’re interested in monetizing your images, now may be the time to look at one of these great solutions.