Using Social Media for your Photographer Makeover

Most of you know me as a stock guy.  And rightly so.  Since that’s where I’ve spent the last couple of decades.  Shooting commercial, travel and lifestyle imagery for every major stock house in the business.  I saw record highs in 2005-2006.  Then record lows in the beginning of 2007 to the present.  Because of this decline in return-per-image (better known as RPI), I began exploring other potential revenue streams.  To not just survive…but thrive.  Enter social media.

I’m flat out making my business more web 2.0 centric.  For me, that means migrating my role from photographer to publisher. From production to education. From stills-only to multi-media content.  From word-of-mouth to word-of-mouse.  From narrow marketing to viewing the world as my oyster. From stock-only income to a wide range of products and services – including photo tours, international shootouts, webinars, blogsites, eBooks, and consulting.  All geared to this new connected generation of customers: photographers, producers and storytellers.

The amazing thing about virally making-over your core business is, while painstakingly tedious, once in place, it will allow you the luxury of focusing on what you’re best at.  And perhaps shooting the sort of pictures that brought you to the dance in the first place.

Plunging into a photographic makeover of your business, so it’s more web 2.0 saavy and compliant, means taking all of those experiences, brand equity, good will, personas that you have painstakingly, over time, developed offline and creating the same – online.

I’m starting to be convinced that survivability no longer depends on ‘offline’ value only. You need both. Off and online equity and value. Working in concert with each other.

Invest the time now and the rewards will not only be immediate, but potentially lucratiave. It’s time for photographers to make-over their brand and business.

Charlie Rose is Free!

For those of you who know me, you probably know that Charlie Rose is my favorite show on TV. As a curious person, I find the guests on the Charlie Rose show peak my interest even if I know nothing about the subject or topic. The number of books I have read based on the CR Interviews, actually fill a library.

Recently a series of interviews involved two interesting people, the first was Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine , author of the article  Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business  and the book, Free, The Future of a Radical Price. It is an interesting perspective on the “economics of abundance” and  the FREE concept, go here to watch the interview – it’s free! 

The second interview was with Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu.com. Mister Kiler explains better than anyone, the Premise of FREE economics as well as what it really means to media companies and to the consumer. He uses real world examples like the New York Times as well as Hulu.com. Mister Kiler also give prime examples of how new media and social media companies may monetize themselves using the FREE and FREEMIUM models. This interview is online here.

 As a creative services business owner, not everything they advocate will apply to my business, but I think Mr. Kilar and Mr. Anderson lay out a series of models that our clients will be using to make money, from FREE.

Free As A Part of Your Business Model

As Gail Mooney pointed out, Chris Anderson’s new book “Free” is causing quite a stir. Evidenced by the lasting effect Anderson’s observations and predictions in “The Long Tail” have had on business and culture, it is likely “Free,” the idea that businesses need to think about giving things away for free via the Internet in order to make money,  is a concept that is here to stay. What is uncertain is how photographers can adapt to, and take advantage of the “Free” model. Musicians, using MySpace and other online tools, give away streaming music tracks to cultivate a larger following and sell more tickets at their next concert. Mr. Anderson provided free access to “Free” online for a limited time to generate more speaking engagements and sell more books. While these techniques are effective for their respective businesses, they do not correlate well for most photographers who are selling business to business instead of business to consumer. And, in an age where photographers are still working to communicate the value of professional photography, what would giving it away for free communicate to businesses?

Here’s an idea. I think we can all agree that giving away a photo as free stock is generally a bad idea. So, instead, give away free e-books of your latest photo project to sell limited edition copies of the book,  fine-art prints, or to serve as a powerful, yet inexpensive marketing tool. Can this “free” strategy also be successful in generating one-on-one relationships with clients—most photographers’ ultimate goal?

It remains to be seen if photojournalists and fine-art photographers will be able to use the tools of “Free” to galvanize followers of a cause or patrons of the arts to fund a book project, documentary film or traveling exhibition. Certainly the concept of “Free” will challenge the business models of not only photographers, but also the businesses comprising their primary client base.

Free?

Recently there has been a lot of buzz about Chris Anderson’s new book “Free”.   Malcolm Gladwell’s review of “Free” makes the point that even free comes at a cost. Most photographers can certainly attest to that.  Marketing guru Seth Godin makes the point that the paradigm is changing and that all the whining in the world won’t bring back “the old days.”  Mark Cuban chimes in as well to provide more perspective and perhaps the most balanced of the lot. While no one has a crystal ball to predict the future, this new paradigm of “free” has already changed the lives of  photographers and all content creators.

It has been stated numerous times by others that “content” must be unique and such that it is not found anywhere else.  The drop in what stock images are being licensed for can attest to that.  In addition, technology changes means a photographer can no longer just be a technician.

Put these challenges together and I think that photographers need to position themselves as being more than just the content producer.  Unless of course what you do is so unique or great that a buyer can go nowhere else.  Certainly one way is to partner with others or position yourself further up the ladder or both.  What I have learned so far about social media marketing is that really anyone can position themselves to whomever and however they want – at little or no cost.  It’s free right?  Well, to a certain extent.  It is, or can be, a demand on one’s time and could be a waste of time if not done strategically.

Technology is and always has been a double edge sword – just like a bad economy.  If one chooses to look in the rear view mirror and lament the past – they’ll drive by all the opportunities.

Free Isn’t New

Does the concept of free economy mean anything to you? What if we replaced the word free with low-risk? Is the concept of low-risk economy easier to understand?

One of the most powerful companies in the world, Google, offers its core services for free. There is no risk involved in Google. There is no risk when you click on the ads that feed their coffers. Software developers have been using the low-risk economy concept for years. The idea is to allow you to try the product for free or use a “lite” version in the hope that you see the value and want to purchase the full software package later.

Unfortunately, many companies have used this concept poorly. As a result, they have devalued their product or service. They failed to present the product’s value up front. The impression is that the service isn’t worth the price.

If you offer free services to attract clients, make sure the true value is stated or implied. Retail portrait photographers have used this technique for years by waiving the sitting fee in order to reap the value of their work through reprints.

When implemented properly, the Internet’s free economy works the same way. Offering free products or services can increase visibility, attracts fans and create buzz. Often, only a small percentage of new prospects may be willing to upgrade. But, if the product or service offers value, quality sales will result from the low-risk offer.

I Highly Recommend “Free, The Future of a Radical Price” by Chris Anderson

Chris Anderson’s new book is a provocative look at the growing economy of free. I know many of you may roll your eyes at the thought that “free” is our new competition, but do not judge this book by it’s title. Anderson provides a careful investigation outlining the history and future of this economic driver, and in so doing, removed my fear and replaced it with new ideas for my business.

Like most photographers, it has become increasingly difficult for me to maintain profitable fees let alone institute increases, so when I read, “Products that can become commoditized and cheap tend to do so, and companies seeking profits move upstream in search of new scarcities,” I realized this book has a message for photographers. I kept reading and my copy is now dog-eared and underlined.

Marketing Quick Tip from Leslie

Plan a trip to show your book in another city. This doesn’t have to cost a lot–for example, if you are in Cincinnati, drive to Columbus or Lexington for the day. When you call the targets, make sure they know you are coming from out of town because that will often open doors.

Photoshop Quick Tip: Maximize Photoshop File Compatibility

In Photoshop’s preferences, under the File Handling tab, be sure to change the Maximize PSD and PSB File Compatibility from “Ask” to “Always.” Although this makes your file sizes larger, it ensures your layered Photoshop files will display correctly in other imaging applications like Lightroom, InDesign, Microsoft Expression Media and Extensis Portfolio.

Following Through

We tend to put great effort into our marketing and trying to get new clients, but what about after the photo shoot? How are you presenting the final images? Think about what the packaging and presentation look like and follow through with your branding. It’s another opportunity to make a great and lasting impression.

Mantras for a Good Life

1. Always have a dream.  Believe in it. Believe in your ability to make it happen.
2. Keep your passions alive.  For me, my strong interest in cultural stories will always keep me exploring.  I need that and it gives my life perspective.
3. Set goals – even little goals are good and then reward yourself.  They will all lead up to you making your dream come true. 
4. Make decisions or they will be made for you. 
5. Do the “right thing.” You will love yourself more if you do.

Quick Tip Week – Build a Technology Plan

Most businesses think about business plans and marketing plans but it’s important to develop a technology plan, too.  Think about what new technologies (and skills) you need to invest in over the next year or two.  Include their costs in your CODB analysis and make sure you’re clear on how they’re going to help you increase your value so you can recoup the costs!

Flash Site? Use Off-Page Optimization

For me, the search engines (primarily Google) bring me about 60-percent of my new clients each year.  I work hard to keep my site high in the rankings.

You should optimize your site for the keyword phrase that you think clients needing your type of photography will enter into the search engine.  But what if you have a Flash site?  That probably means you have minimal control over your page’s text content, or body copy, and that is exactly what search engines need to index your site.  See my related Strictly Business Blog post, “Content is King.”

I know, Google and Adobe recently announced a partnering effort to help the search engine index Flash content, but it relies on true text in the Flash element, not bitmapped text created in an image editing program such as Photoshop; not a perfect solution.  And yes, they’re now reading the data contained in .xml files that sometimes accompany Flash elements, but it’s still a bit clumsy at this point.

So what to do if your site relies heavily on Flash?  Consider utilizing what’s generally referred to as off-page optimization.  One method of off-page optimization involves getting links to your site from other websites.  Ideally, they’ll need to be from “relevant” websites, or more specifically, from other photographers or sites that are about photography.

Here are two things you can do to get incoming links that don’t require a lot of effort.  First, when you produce images that will be used on your client’s website, request not just a credit, but a credit that is a link back to your site.  These end up being one-way links, and from an SEO standpoint, they’re very valuable indeed.

Second, exchange links with other photographers.  These links to your competitors should of course be somewhat discreet, but note I didn’t say invisible, that will get you penalized by Google.  My site has three pages of these reciprocal links to other photographer’s sites and all of us are benefiting from the exchange. Be sure to build your incoming links slowly over time, and ideally exchange links with photographers who already rank highly in the search engines.

Good luck!

Website Solutions You Can Plug Into Quickly

If you don’t have a website yet and need one, or want to get a portfolio or body of work onto the web quickly, you might consider using a template kind of web hosting service. These providers generally offer some kind of predesigned model that you can plug your work into quickly that will give an attractive, well organized presentation to showcase your work.

There are a number of such hosting services out there, one of which is Sitewelder. My own site is hosted by Sitewelder, and my experience with them has been very positive (I am not affiliated with them in any way, I am just a happy customer). Sitewelder offers a variety of templates, decent customer service, and reasonable monthly fees. You can tinker with your site directly, making changes or add/swapimages at any time and from any location, without having to go through a designer and waiting for them to update it. If you want or need design help, it is available.

Sitewelder hosts many photographers across a variety of specialties, and has a number of options for presenting web galleries of work. When I transferred my site to Sitewelder several years ago, I worked with their staff to slightly modify one of their templates to keep continuity with the look and feel of my previous site. This worked well for me, and my site has been there ever since.

The down side of using providers like these is that some people complain they are too “cookie cutter” and similar to each other. But if you want your site to look unique, its not too hard to make modifications that give your site its own distinct look and feel.

With services like these available that are both a good showcase and fairly economical, there is no excuse not to have your work up on the web.

Some examples of photographers’ sites powered by Sitewelder:
Brian Smith
Chip Simons
David Burnett
Paula Lerner
William Coupon

Optimization Vs. Presentation

This is one of those difficult decisions when designing a new website. You want your work to look it’s best and be presented in an impressive manner, but you also want your work to be found through search engines.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have both? Unfortunately in many cases a compromise may be required. Many different techniques are used for top search engine rankings but it often involves tactics that may take away from the presentation aspect.

Here is something I’ve started to do that may be a solution for some. I was working on search engine optimization and tweaking my website for many years. Eventually, my website listed first page in the major search engines for most keywords I desired and it definitely brought in work. As my business grew, I decided it was time to go after high-end clients. Designing a nice clean look that would attract the high-end clients would be difficult.

My big concern was about losing search engine rankings if I switched to a different layout. It’s kind of scary if it means a loss in business. The solution was to have two websites, one web optimized version and one presentation optimized version with very little text for a clean look and bigger images. The web optimized site isn’t advertised and just floats out there for people to find on the internet. The nicer looking website is the only site I advertise and people will find it directly through email campaigns, directories and postcards.

We are hearing more about photographers segmenting their portfolios and websites according to specialties, so why not have multiple sites based on optimization and presentation?

Does Your Website Wow?

Your website is your most important marketing tool. Are you investing in it (both in money and thought) to make it the best it can possibly be? Too often photographers try to cut corners and save money on their sites, but if you have to limit your budget, this is not the place to trim.

While simple and clean websites are preferred by buyers of all stripes (stock or assignment) that kind of design sensibility needs a gentle, experienced hand to get it right. Work with a designer. Well liked (by buyers!) web services like Livebooks actually design each site individually or you can work with your own designer, but this is not the place to DIY.

Make sure you don’t have opening animations or slideshows. Both irritate buyers. For the intro, you may have a brief load-page image or the like, but just to cover the load time, not to make some statement. Instead of a slideshow, make sure to have static previous/next buttons to that the user can park the cursor and click-click-click.

And about the images–remember you have almost no time to grab your target. Ask some friends how they navigate your site (or if you have good stats, check those) to see what images are seen first. Make sure those images are your best. You can’t bury the great work–people will click off before they get to it!

Speaking of images, are you visibly watermarking yours? Don’t. It doesn’t provide you with any real protection but it does run off buyers. They want to see the work in its entirety, not with some schmutz on it. Do, however, make sure you have all your metadata straight, including copyright information and contact info too.

Lastly, check your contact info–make sure it is accurate and that you include your phone number as well as an email address. No forms.

Paying attention to these points will help your website work harder for you. Of course, the most important thing is to make great work to show on the site. Keep shooting for yourself to make your best work!

The Best Starting Point for Your Website

I decided to do my first website partly because my studio manager at the time was getting a bit bored, and I thought doing it might engage him. So I said, “Let’s do a website.” He said, “Great! …What’s a website?” And I said, “I don’t know.”

Back then no one really knew. There was no way everyone did it, because pretty much no one had done it. So we had to think about what we wanted this thing to look like and  say.  We were forced to start with the simple question, What do we want this to do?

Well, I wanted it to show the kind of work I that loved doing, the kind that drew me into photography in the first place, in the hope that someone would pay me to do it.

So we took photos and laid them all around and made piles and more piles. There was a clear connection between jobs and personal work, and I want to make that point. So we combined all the little piles  into two big ones, called Work and Soul. And voila! We had our structure for the site…which as it happened was a circle, not a list.

Surfing thus on our ignorance, we made a perfect site for an artistically inclined photographer who also worked for clients. Which was exactly what I was.

The idea of starting with who we were worked. Now there’s a lot more to know about making a site, but looking at who you are, not what you want to appear to be, is still the best starting point.

Are Your Photos Protected?

If your studio were to catch fire right now, would your digital photos be safe? Many photographers make the mistake of backing up to two separate hard drives, only to leave both hard drives sitting on their desk. This protects against a hard drive failure, but does nothing to protect against fire, flood or theft.

To ensure you’re adequately protected, store your files in at least two physical locations. One option is to rotate a set of drives off-site, e.g. one at your studio and one at home. A second option is to use an Internet-based storage site, like .Mac, Mozy or Amazon S3 and store your photos on an industrial-strength server cloud.

Storing your entire image library on a server cloud may seem ideal, but the bandwidth needs for uploading gigabytes of photos, along with the monthly storage costs, make this prohibitive for most photographers. Still, you can use this method to upload your most valuable images along with your business correspondence, contracts and e-mail correspondence very inexpensively. Given the consequences of a catastrophic loss, off-site backups may be the most valuable and least expensive insurance policy available for your business.

Vertical TV Sets

Have you ever seen a vertical TV?  I haven’t, but I wonder with the hybrid cameras that look like still cameras and shoot video, will we all be turning our TV’s on end?

The point is that just because the camera shoots video, doesn’t mean the operator will be thinking like a video shooter.  As one who still shoots in both mediums – still photography and video – I have to turn a switch in my head when I switch gears.

Shooting still images are “moments in time.” Shooting video is “time in motion.” You must think more in sequences when shooting video – each one having a beginning, middle and end.  In addition, these independent “clips” need to be edited together to create a story.  When I get into a shot – I need to think about how I will get out of that shot – or what will come next in the story line.

You also need to shoot a lot more when producing video.  You need to “shoot and move” – covering different angles and different focal lengths within those angles. You need a variety of wide, medium and long shots – AND close-ups.  One quickly understands why when you go to edit the piece.  In fact, editing your own material will make you a better shooter.

So when you pick up your new camera that also shoots video – make sure you flip that switch in your head and think differently because it is a different medium.  Otherwise, you’ll be turning your 52″ inch TV set on end.

What Photos Do You Really Need in Your Image Library?

After shooting digitally for many years, many photographers have amassed prodigious collections of digital photos, often surpassing 100,000 or 200,000 images. These photographers now find themselves struggling to organize, manage and backup this immense image library effectively.

Unless you’ve invested tens of thousands of dollars in an enterprise-level asset management system and server system, you’re likely to find any database program slow, unwieldy and crash-prone. All-in-one applications like Adobe Lightroom and Apple’s Aperture begin to slow with large libraries above 40-50,000 images and even dedicated asset management systems like Extensis Porfolio or Canto Cumulus struggle with 100,000 images.

Rather than investing in more robust asset management applications, ask yourself “What photos do I really need access to?” Often, by saving older jobs and outtakes to external hard drives on a regular basis, you can slim your image library considerably. This saves you money on storage space, makes photos easier to find and your image database quicker to search.

Multimedia Made (Relatively) Easy

If you’re looking for a way to produce a simple audio slide show (stills combined with either music or an ambient sound/interview track) that is fairly straightforward and does not require extensive training, look into a program called SoundSlides.  Labeling itself as “Ridiculously Simple Storytelling,” it is just that.  I have been producing multimedia for three years now, and for the first two and a half I produced everything in SoundSlides.  With it I was able to deliver professional, plug-and-play features to my clients.

Created in the late 1990s by former photojournalist Joe Weiss, SoundSlides is basically an easy to use Flash template for photographers.  You import an audio file plus a folder of JPEGs, and arrange the images on a time line as you see fit. Hit export, and SoundSlides creates a folder (named “publish-to-web”) that you can easily upload to the web.

If you want to get your feet wet in producing multimedia, or if you have a fairly simple presentation you want to create, SoundSlides is a great way to go.  One limitation is that if you have a feature that is longer than 2-3 minutes which uses more than 40-50 images, the interface can get crowded and harder to use.  Also, if you want complete manual control, it is not the best software choice.  I migrated to Final Cut Pro recently for these reasons, but Final Cut has a significantly steep and off-putting learning curve.  SoundSlides can be learned and used much more quickly, and is designed specifically for producing audio slide shows (no video).  Plus, its inexpensive ($39.95 or $69.95, depending on which version you choose), and has an online community of users that are generally helpful.  I am in no way associated or affiliated with this product, just a happy user.

Some examples of features created with SoundSlides published online:
The Photographer: The Making of a Graphic Novel
Jazz 2009 Tales
Under One Roof

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