Nikon, doing it the right way!

I’m a little late in posting this but I thought I would follow up from my post about the Canon competition. Earlier this month, Nikon for the launch of their new D80 decided to try something a little more visionary. While not a competition, they gave camera to a select number members of flickr and told them to shoot with the new camera. The results were then posted as a demonstration of the capabilities of the camera at the Stunning Nikon site.

A smart move. Nikon got a great example of the use of the camera. The photographers got a new camera. The community on flickr got the benefit of the visibility and the blogs got to spread the viral message.

The use of flickr was certainly a good move. It was very easy to identify the photographers who would be suitable both from the images they produce, the friends they have and the micro communities that they belong to on the site. While the Nikon campaign site uses flash (simply and effectively), it does manage to embrace flickr by providing links back to the photographers profiles. The whole current web 2.0 meme of remixing sites, although not used to its full extent is integrated.

Back to the Canon competition, the opportunity to use a mature site such as flickr that is open would have been better in so many ways. The users, the community, the CGM, the mature photo tools (tags, comments, notes, etc) and even a relationship with Yahoo/Flickr (cross promotion anyone?). As it is all API based, it could be pulled out into a site that is branded like the competition but has all the rich functionality provided by flickr. If done right it could have avoided some of the issues that I mentioned previously

To the credit of Nikon, they were ahead of the curve for the competition. As far as I am aware they are the first to do something like this. Smart, fresh thinking. I’m looking forward to seeing more ideas like this (and even more, building these sort of things at here)

Note: If you are feeling a strange sense of deja vue, this is an updated post from my personal blog