Getty Images licenses content. But that content has traditionally lived in their owned online destinations to be searched for by users, with the obvious limitations that this brings.

We saw a chance to help Getty Images position themselves for the way that people increasingly consume media – in streams, in real-time, wherever they are, across multiple devices.

Over a 3 month period, a core team of 5 developed a product called the Feed. Working in an Agile way, producing rapid technical prototypes, the team created a cloud service that allows users to create custom searches of Getty content. Search keywords can be chosen by the user or automatically shortlisted using a social listening algorithm created specifically for The Feed (the algorithm has now been patented by Getty Images.)

The team developed several clients and connectors to consume the search service, these allow relevant pictures to be posted to owned Getty presences and also on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr within minutes of the photographer on the ground taking the picture.

The Feed was beta-tested at the end of 2012, being released publicly in January 2013 to wide coverage in publications such as Wired and Mashable.

The Feed was an answer to a marketing brief – to position GI as an innovator, make their editorial content more accessible and connect them up with the new breed of Social media brands.

The Feed is a new innovation, a publishing platform built specifically to enable Getty Images and their clients to easily and rapidly publish relevant hero content to social channels with the minimum of human intervention or curation.

Through the management interface, images can either be searched for, selected and published directly, or alternatively searches can be scheduled to run at specific times to publish images for specific events (sporting events, fashion shows, film premieres, etc).

The service-based framework manages the publishing schedule, as well as social listening and has separate connector services for each social platform.

Developed in PHP and Python the cloud-hosted Social Engine has been built on an extensible service-based model that allows for scalability and the simple addition of future services.

An enhancement roadmap is in place for the rest of 2013: an interface that allows GI to generate customized, event-specific Feed applications; enhance the ability to customize descriptions and tags and allow for regional management of users and searches within the interface.

An example of the power of The Feed came during alpha testing. We used the social listening algorithm to analyse Twitter conversation and automatically post to Facebook a picture of Cristiano Ronaldo celebrating scoring the winning goal against Manchester City.

The next day the same photo was the choice of many picture editors for their backpages.

The long-term goal for the Feed is for it to become the sole tool used by Getty Images and their clients to manage the timely distribution of content to their social channels.

The tool is currently in use on a daily basis by Getty Images’ social teams in Europe and the USA, with further deployment, training and uptake planned through Q2 and Q3.

Looking forwards, Getty has the opportunity to offer this tool as a product so that partners and clients can streamline the management of their social properties and benefit from the ease, relevance and automation of content distribution offered.

A key part of the development of The Feed was to enhance Getty Image’s reputation as an innovator and the publicity that the product has generated, in publications from Wired to the Financial Times, is estimated to have generated global press impressions of over 200 million.