Tumblr, one of the most visual social media/microblogging networks, is making a move to help brands better understand what’s happening in the 130 million photos uploaded on the site every day.
As reported first by Mashable today, Tumblr has agreed to a partnership with Ditto Labs, a Cambridge, Mass., startup that analyzes online photos for brand-related data.
Compared to text, photos are a notoriously tough nut to crack for consumer intelligence; people usually don’t include complete or accurate caption information about the photos they share online. That leaves marketers largely in the dark about brand affiliations in social photo streams.
Ditto Labs’ solution uncovers logos and products within those public feeds. You can view a firehose stream of what that looks like here.
Ditto Labs already provided clients with information about Tumblr photos, as well as Twitter and Instagram, but this new deal gives it full access to the Tumblr firehose. “This is a Tumblr firehose partnership with Ditto,” a Tumblr spokesperson wrote in an email to Venture Beat, “where Ditto can tap into the massive stream of images shared on Tumblr daily to help their clients understand visual conversations happening around their brands.”
Such information, of course, could be used to target advertising to Tumblr users, but T.R. Newcomb, Tumblr’s head of business development, told Mashable that isn’t in the company’s current plans. Instead, the Yahoo-owned microblogging site will leave it to Ditto Labs provide data to clients.
“If Coke wants to understand the nature of the conversation (about them on Tumblr) Ditto can sift through and deliver it to Coke,” Newcomb said.
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