Tag: Marketing

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Creative Geek

Why I Blog, And What I Should Blog About…

I couldn’t agree with Tom Peters more in this video. Blogging in the past 9 years has totally changed my life. I still remember a time when I said I blogged and people looked at me with that strange look. Now? I can honestly say I’ve got friends all over the US, Europe and Australia that I know thanks to blogging – some I’ve met in person, some I haven’t, but that doesn’t matter. I don’t discount their friendship based on that. They are my friends just the same.

But my blog has suffered thanks to Twitter (which I’ve claimed before has killed my blog) and because of my work as a wedding photographer. I still have a lot to share that I write about frequently on forums (SWPB, Fast Track Photographer) and on PhotoLoveCat, but I don’t write about here. (I don’t plan to stop writing over there in those places.)

Recently I’ve started wondering why? Why not? Some of it may be of no interest to my older blog readers (like the methodology behind pricing photography) but then again, it might be interesting to many others. I love to read and talk about marketing, branding, pricing … all the things that make a business run. Even a creative business.

I considered writing about these things over on my business blog — but it just seems out of place there. Not that I have anything to hide from my clients – many of them know where this blog is at and if not it is easily found via Google – but just because it doesn’t seem to fit in. Or does it?

As I ramble about business topics, should I post them here? Or over there? I know Big Pink Cookie has nothing to do with marketing & branding and how to run a photography (or creative) business, but seriously, it makes you smile when you say the name out loud. Go ahead and try it. See? Smiling, right? It is my personal brand. It is me. I am it. We are one.

Now tell me what you think?

Categories
BlahBlahBabble

Embracing Change in a Fast Moving World…

Things happen at an amazingly fast pace these days. Something happens, someone makes a video, sticks it up on YouTube, before you know it a meme has been born, and it is remembered for a long time afterwards.

(If you don’t care about all this business stuff – watch the video. It is pretty awesome.)

As photographers, we’re putting photos out there in a digital form. Our clients then take the photos and use them, maybe in ways we didn’t intend originally. What should you do? Should you embrace it? Enable it? Or be angry?

How you choose to react can impact how people feel about your brand for the long run. More & more people think that if they have the files, it is ok to upload them all to Facebook, Flickr, or wherever else. Sharing them with their friends. From their perspective, they’ve done nothing wrong. Even though your license may not authorize them to post them online at all.

I plan to provide all of my 2009 clients with a web-ready DVD, along with instructions that those images can be posted anywhere and everywhere. I *want* them to post them all over the place. I use the Mogrify2 Plugin for Lightroom and put my logo on every file on the DVD. Whenever someone sees the images, they can easily look me up and hire me for their own great photos. My clients love the idea, and I love that I’m giving them a way to spread the love.

I’ve been thinking about all of this for a few weeks now. Peter Shankman, the man behind Help A Reporter Out – aka HARO, came to Houston recently to talk at an ISES meeting about things like Twitter, Facebook, and your business. You know I couldn’t pass that opportunity up!

At the end of his presentation, he closed by showing us the following video. First he told us the backstory. Basically, there was a mime. Everyone hates mimes, probably even more than clowns. So the mime came up with a routine to this song, Torn, by Natalie Imbruglia. Originally, when “the Man” got word that he was doing this performance to a song, they were not happy. Copyright issues, performing to a song without the proper license (you know, sort of like when people put your digital files on Facebook even though the license doesn’t cover that), and cease & desist letters were going to go out. But then the artist’s manager found out about it. It was already a hit on the internet. They stopped and realized that they could take the other route. They could tap into the buzz already generated, and use it to turn it into something so much more.

(I’m such a dork. I get goosebumps every time I watch this video!)

What are you embracing as technology moves at such a breakneck speed? What are you doing to make sure your clients have the best experience possible while working with you, and that makes them want to shout from the rooftops about your work?

(Posted over on PhotoLoveCat too, but I wanted to share it here as well!)