Yesterday, during lunch, I went out and took some photos of the area around Headshift’s London headquarters in Shad Thames, just east of the south end of Tower Bridge. When I uploaded them to Flickr, I added notes to each photo, linking the images to create a sort of interactive tour of the area and our offices.

It’s an idea that I’ve been toying with ever since coming across a similar virtual tour Ulrich Thumult created using photographs he took of the Azores, a group of Portuguese Islands in the mid-Atlantic.

The tour starts at Tower Bridge, which most of us here at Headshift pass on our way to the office each day, wanders down Shad Thames, past the Design Museum along the Thames, and into our offices on Maguire Street.

I can imagine a hyperlinked tour like this being an interesting way to introduce potential recruits, or new employees, to people and places within an organisation. Likewise, media and publishing companies could use this idea to, for example, show audiences their production process, take them around the set of a filming location, or present the story of an event. Town and City Councils might use the technique to create a tour of local points of interest, shops or restaurants.

I put together the tour as a bit of fun, but it also demonstrates something I think is really special about Headshift – we’re all genuine enthusiasts when it comes to using social media in creative ways, whether it’s dreaming up a client proposition, using social tools to improve our delivery of projects, or in our personal lives.

Like the audiences for the client propositions we devise and implement, we’re a diverse group of people, each trying to achieve different things through a range of social tools and services that we enjoy using. Because of this, when new client work comes along, one of the first things we do is gather together in a room to toss around ideas, much of them based on our own professional or personal encounters with social media. The result being creative, and sometimes less than obvious, strategies for supporting desirable user behaviours, encouraging user uptake, exploration and engagement, and helping clients meet their business needs.