Flickr-alternative Zooomr is launching a major new version over the course of today, and is doing a number of interesting things with social media to promote the launch and engage users. Quite a few of the Oratos team use Zooomr because of the price advantage over Flickr (it’s completely free without limits), so I expect there’ll be a review of the service when it launches later today, but what I want to look at in this post is the way that they are going about launching it.

Zooomr CEO and well-known photographer Thomas Hawk is (and has been for a few hours now) sitting on a UStream.tv channel, embedded below. This is a live video stream from a web cam, with a chat box below. Thomas has been taking questions from users on everything from Zooomr to his recommendations for SLR lenses. The chat room and direct interaction between users and him (and occasionally founder Kris) is encouraging a great sense of community; a sense that users have some sort of ownership over the service that they use. He’s also getting potentially valuable feedback by having that direct conversation. Equally importantly, it helps to take the sting out of the fact that Zooomr has now been down for quite some time while they do the upgrade.

Kris Tate, the legendary 19-year-old founder of the service, has also been making posts on Vimeo, a great video blogging website. Much of what applies to the live stream is significant here, with his chatty, honest style doing much to encourage anticipation of the relaunch and subdue irritation at the service being down. He’s also posted a demo of the service, which is in general a great thing to have done because it helps bloggers who want to cover the next version (Mashable has already done so, for example, despite the fact that Mark III is not live yet) and gives a hype-enducing titbit. The one criticism, though, is that the demo isn’t great. Kris tries things that don’t work, which he doesn’t need to demonstrate, like geotagging Japanese landmarks in English. The lack of this functionality doesn’t matter to the vast majority of those watching the demo, so why embarrass oneself by letting the service fail?

Maybe I’ve over analysed all this, but I just thought it was a really neat way for a small startup for which community is essential to encourage that community and make it feel enfranchised through the relaunch. It shows that conventional PR, and even standard new media evangelism , just isn’t necessary in some cases to get coverage and hype for a launch. Now all that matters is the product itself, which we’ll see in the morning. Hopefully!