When Viral Goes AWOL
Do you have more Facebook friends than a new lottery winner? Do you tweet more than a caged canary on steroids? If so, then you are obviously on the social media bandwagon and loving it, which is supposed to be a good thing for our photography businesses, right?
Well, yes it’s a great thing, but…
As with everything useful in life, there’s usually a “but” that puts a wrench in the works. Facebook is a great way to stay in touch with friends, family and clients (but please don’t tell us all what you’re having for dinner – we really don’t care), and it’s a wonderful place to showcase our work, perhaps in the hope of it going at least a teeny bit viral when our clients share it with their friends.
Sounds wonderful in theory: Photographer creates portrait, makes a web-friendly image (with a copyright mark, of course) and posts it on Facebook with the appropriate tags to alert the subject and their friends, people see the photograph and love it, call us, and we get more work…
In practice, though, this is what really happened in at least one instance: Photographer creates portrait, makes aforementioned web-friendly copy and posts it online. Someone then takes their own photo of the actual physical portrait with a camera-phone and uploads a blurry, shaky, hideously-colored, night-of-the-living-dead version of the photographer’s work, with the client tagged.
Now, the client’s friends see a rather suspect-looking photograph that looks anything but professional. Not a good thing in anyone’s book.
People have been taking photos of photos long before Facebook ever came along, so I don’t think there’s much we can do about this type of behavior except to keep an eye out and try to catch it. At least we can then politely educate the client about copyright, while asking them to remove the offending image and replace it with our “correct” version.
With the prevalence of Facebook and other photo-sharing web sites, the truth is that this probably happens to a lot more photographers than actually realize it, if they are themselves not on Facebook or not connected to their clients. I guess we’re better off being on there than not, if only to catch these types of things and intervene.
Recent Comments: