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Can Giving Away Brunswick Stew Online Help Promote Your Business?

Here’s the story of something that happened to me with one of my online photos. I’m trying to figure out if it can be useful for other people and businesses, or if it’s just an exercise in vanity. Please bear with me.

I use Flickr to store and share photos. Since I don’t figure on ever making any money from my photos, I license them with a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, which is like a less restrictive form of copyright. Anyone is free to use the photo, as long as they give me attribution, and distribute any resulting works under a similar license (so they can’t take one of my photos and try to copyright it as their own work).

Why do I do this? Like I said, I’m not selling photos, and I figure that if you make it easy for people to use your stuff, they will. They could just as easily “steal” the photo and I would never know, but by saying, “go ahead and use the photo, just give me credit,” that’s a pretty reasonable thing.

Plus, groups like media organizations, respectable bloggers, and companies typically want to stay legal — they can’t just grab a photo off the Web, because someone might call them on it. Free is better than cheap, especially when it’s legal. And easy.

So, anyway, consider this photo of a batch of Brunswick Stew that I made last year:

If you’re not familiar, Brunswick Stew is a thick, tasty stew, usually made with chicken or rabbit (cooked until it falls apart), and lots of vegetables (I use corn, tomato, okra, lima beans and such).

Because it was my first time using a slow cooker, I did a blog entry about about it, and then more or less forgot about it.

Skip ahead to this year. I was looking at my blog statistics (for a personal blogger, it’s vanity — for business bloggers, it’s necessity), when I noticed my Brunswick Stew entry was getting hits from Wikipedia, and Wikimedia Commons (a repository of public domain and freely-licensed media).

Because I’d licensed my photo under Creative Commons (and also tagged and described it accurately), someone found it in an image search (using Flickr, you can restrict your search to non-copyrighted photos), added it to Wikimedia Commons (with proper attribution — my name, and a link to the original photo) where it was then used in the Wikipedia entry on Brunswick Stew.

Similar things have happened with some of my other photos. So, here’s the part I’m trying to figure out: Outside of the ego boost, am I getting any benefits from people using my photos in these places? Possibly.

I’m getting traffic to my Flickr pics, and there are links that lead back to my blog. Having my name associated with content on Wikimedia is a good thing (though there aren’t any direct links to my blog from Wikipedia, which would be a great thing, in terms of inbound links from high-value pages and SEO.)

How can this help you? Can this help you?

I still haven’t decided on this. I don’t think it would be a huge win, but say you’re a restaurant — you’re probably already taking pictures of dishes for menus and your Web site, so why not make them freely available?

This works best if you’re creating your own content. (Food is content, right?) There are some businesses this won’t work for, of course. For retailers, like book or record stores, you’re dealing with other people’s copyrights. And professional photographers are a completely different problem, so I won’t pretend to speak for them.

(And if you do try the Wikimedia route directly, be sure to follow the contribution guidelines.)

On the one hand, it’s increased traffic to your stuff. On the other hand, most of it is probably random internet people who you’ll never interact with.

I’m curious to hear if anyone thinks this idea has any merit, who it might or won’t work for, and other ways you can give stuff away online to help promote your business.

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