Those vacation or other personal photos that you upload to Flickr, SmugMug, Picasa or other picture repository sites may not remain private. England’s Guardian newspaper reports on its web site that a Missouri family’s Christmas card photo ended up in a grocery store ad for a company in Prague, Czech Republic. A family friend of Jeff and Danielle Smith spotted the photo on a billboard advertising the grocery store’s home delivery service.
The Smiths, to their credit, have leveraged the free exposure. Danielle Smith’s blog, ExtraordinaryMommy.com has received thousands of visitors and hundreds of incoming links (like this one) as this story circulates around the web.
The lesson: do not post any photo onto a photo sharing site that you do not want appearing on a billboard in an eastern European country, and leverage web traffic any way you can!
[…] that affect online marketing. Previously I have written on this site about stolen web content and misappropriated photographs. Today I'd like to discuss another issue that has cropped up more and more – online […]