Zenologue

The week ending March 13th 2010 was an apparent and important milestone in the world of social media networking, when Facebook surpassed Google in the count of most site visits in a week in the United States (full story can be read here. This was not the first time that Facebook overtook Google, but it was the first week-long victory, and it has the potential to become permanent.

As the number of subscribers to Facebook continues to grow, with the “population” of Facebook being compared to that of actual countries, it may be no surprise to see it become the most-visited site on the web. After all, the “Google” population is able to grow only as more people gain access to the internet, whereas Facebook still has a large pool of currently unregistered internet users to draw from. Eventually, the two populations might stabilize, but then the war really starts about who will attract the most visitors.

However, at the present time, it is possible that we could be near a tipping point where social media and the power of peer-to-peer marketing really do begin to take over from organic searches. Instead of asking Google for a list of local photographers, we can now poll our Facebook friends for testimonials and recommendations of photographers they’ve worked with in the past in order to find a good fit. Such peer-based endorsements are surely much more effective than a PPC ad or a search engine listing, no matter how relevant Google thinks they might be.

I’m sure many businesses are actively trying to figure out how to leverage this trend and tap into this new source of business referrals. Facebook fan pages, tweets and Foursquare check-ins, shout-outs etc. will all no doubt all play their parts.

But this doesn’t come without its own peculiar set of problems. For example, the annoying fact that we have to use a multitude of apps and web sites in our social networking activities. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, MySpace, Plaxo and a host of others all attempt to make the web a social place, but at the expense of  having to maintain profiles all over the place and spend [waste?] time trying to keep them all current and up to the minute.

But, the biggest issue I see right now, though, is that of signal-to-noise. Typically used in science and engineering to measure the quality of an electrical signal, signal-to-noise is the ratio between the useful part of the transmission (the signal) to any artifacts such as random background noise. In email, for example, the signal can be thought of as those emails we want to receive, whereas spam would be considered as unwanted noise.

If the level of noise is allowed to rise too high, compared to the signal, then the quality of the item being measured can be corrupted or degraded. This is why spam is such a nuisance; left unchecked, it would reach levels that make reading our actual emails very difficult, or even render email itself useless as a mode of communication.

Unfortunately, I believe this degradation is also happening with social media. The level of noise (spam, nonsense, pointless posts, meaningless tweets etc.) appears to be growing on a daily basis. I’ve already lost count of the number of dumb applications I’ve had to block from my Facebook profile that would otherwise fill up my news stream with pointless garbage about mob wars, idiotic quizzes and other nonsense distractions.

No doubt the problem has been present from day one, but if the noise is allowed to surpass the signal, the system could be rendered unusable for anything useful, such as promoting a business.

As business owners in a marketplace, it’s unclear what options we have to combat the problem of increasing noise. Unlike spam email, the noise found on Facebook, for example, is cleverly disguised as “fun” in the form of games, quizzes, pointless comparisons to celebrities etc. The population of Facebook as a whole doesn’t seem bothered by this noise, and many even embrace it willingly. Is Facebook doomed to become nothing more than a mob war with 400 million players? In the middle of all that might remain a few “survivors” who plaintively try to sell their wares to what is essentially a world of zombies, but they would be in the clear minority and ineffective.

How are we supposed to cope with the ever-increasing number of social media networking sites that we positively “have” to join simply because everyone else is there? I view myself as fairly restrained and conservative in the world of social media – a newbie if you like. Yet, I still have to juggle Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn & Foursquare in order to be considered even a minor citizen of the social media world.

In the sense that Google effectively took over the internet search niche, I wonder if there will ever be a single social media giant that will completely dominate the role. The “where are you?“, “what are you thinking?“, “what’s happening?“, “what are you feeling?“, “what do you want?” do-it-all place where we have one profile that covers everything.

Whatever happens, it will be interesting to watch this great social experiment unfold, and I’m sure the eventual outcome will be a lot different to anything we can imagine right now

Anyway, thanks for reading. I do have to go now, since my Facebook farm animals are starving and need me…

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Your web site is, quite obviously, a marketing tool for our photography businesses but, if we’re to have the best chance of engaging our market in this Web 2.0 world, then we need to converse with them and not simply present a highly sanitized, techno-laden, emotionless blurb full of keywords that would send even a search engine to sleep.

The immediacy and spontaneity of blogs make them great for this purpose, as are Facebook and Twitter, if used properly. But, even the content on our main web site should be written more conversationally if we’re to catch and keep our readers’ attention.

Look, No Words!

Photographers are blessed with the ability to communicate in both written and visual media. So why is it that we rely so heavily on our photographs to do the marketing for us? After all, slideshows and flashy presentations might look pretty (to us creative people at least), but how effective are they at engaging the prospective client?

It’s said that a picture is worth a thousand words, and maybe some indeed are. However, photographs by themselves are generally not a conversation – conversation starters perhaps, but not conversations in themselves. They may appeal to the viewer on an emotional level, which is a really great start, but we all too often leave it there, with no further attempt to really talk with them. Think of it like this: would you show a client a photograph in person without saying a single word about it? Do you show your friends your vacation photographs without the anecdotal stories that go along with them? Of course not! Just take a look on Facebook at all the comments that can be spawned from the posting of a single image – this is a conversation that anyone can join, and it’s all free.

Striking and powerful images can be wonderful at starting a conversation, but we had better continue that conversation, or our market will simply leave thinking we hung up on them. This can be as simple as acknowledging a user’s comment, thanking someone for a retweet on Twitter, or answering questions.

What Do You Want To Talk About?

It should be clear by now that there’s a need for us to join in with the spirit of this conversation that’s going on all around us – but what should we talk about? Well, one thing’s certain – it’s really no use talking about ourselves. People who talk about themselves too much at parties are usually the ones left standing about on their own guarding the coat pile.

The ideal subject for this conversation is simple: Our Market. Specifically, how they can benefit from our unique selling points, as long as those points are presented in a way free from business-speak. This must be one of the hardest things to do – the traditional concepts of marketing are so ingrained in us that it’s difficult to break the habit.

There is a conflict between our desire to communicate our message and “advertise” what we do, and the need to engage people on a more human level. We need to find ways to “speak” in plain terms, in a truly conversational style that is honest and from the heart, as it were.

For example, say that one of your unique selling points is that you’re an expert at photographing green cats (not much call for that I know but, hey, this is a hypothetical example).

The copy on your web site should appeal to the emotions that owners of green cats generally experience, and how portraits of their precious green pets can have so much sentimental value to them that the investment in a portrait is well worth it for all the benefits they will enjoy from the photographs. You can work into your conversational talk things like how much more adorable green cats can be, how they make strong bonds with their owners and how great they are to have. How sad would it be to not have a portrait of your beloved green cat after it’s gone from this world? This is much more effective than simply saying, “book your green cat portrait session now!” 

You’re The Voice

You could, of course, blast Facebook with status messages such as “Green cats look cool in black & white” or “When it comes to photographing green cats, we’re not green”. But that looks too much like traditional interruptive advertising or spam.

Instead, you could “listen” to the conversation and find people who are saying things like, “I love my green cat”, “my green cat is my best friend” etc. Then you can reply in a nice way that, yes their green cat is indeed cute and might look beautiful in one of your portraits. You don’t even need to mention that you photograph green cats – if you participate enough and allow people to get to know you, they will learn this information by themselves.

Another way to think of it is to imagine having a face-to-face conversation with a prospective client, perhaps someone you just met who asked about your business. The voice they would hear is distinctly you, and obviously human, with feelings, passion and a sincere concern for their needs and desires.

We can transcribe that conversation and apply it to the web site without making the mistake of over-sanitizing it or using fancy words. Okay, I know the web site is essentially an artificial conversation, but the voice you use can still be real and no less you than the spoken word. Keywords are still important for the search engines, but we should never make them a priority over the quality of our content.

The only job of the web site is lead-generation – to encourage the reader to engage you in person by calling, emailing, asking for more information and to involve you in a real conversation with them that can then lead to a booking and potential sales. In order to accomplish this we need to appeal to their emotions, something we should be able to accomplish considering that photography is inherently an emotional business. 

Conclusion

The introduction of the Web 2.0 has not only made the web more interactive and flashy with dynamic content; it has further enabled the online conversation that’s been there since the web was first invented; the difference now is that the conversation is immediate and becoming the dominant force. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Blogs, YouTube, Wikipedia and a host of other social networking sites are bringing the conversation to a rolling boil that is making traditional web marketing almost obsolete. We need to join in or we risk being left behind as relics of a more primitive time …

This post was based on my personal reaction to chapter 4 of The “Cluetrain Manifesto”, which can be found here:

http://www.cluetrain.com/book/markets.html

This was written in the early 1990’s but reads now like a prediction of much that we now take for granted. A very interesting and thought provoking read indeed. 

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Before we can take even a single photograph for a client, before we can sell them so much as one print, we have to engage with them through the process of marketing.

Many photographers are confused about marketing, almost to the point of avoiding it, viewing it like a mystical craft practiced only by members of an elite group. This is understandable, given that marketing today is the result of decades of abuse by big corporations seeking to disseminate their corporate “message” to the consumer masses.

We are the intended target of such marketing efforts every day – in our mailboxes, on TV, the radio, the Internet, billboards, in magazines – the list is endless. But is this really how we, as photographers, should be communicating with our potential clients? To answer this question, we should look back to more primitive days when the term “market” referred to a central gathering place where people came to exchange goods and to talk. There are vestiges of the original concept remaining today in some places, where weekly markets are held in small towns and communities.

The original “market” was simply the customer. It was the collection of people who bought or traded goods in person from local tradesmen in a central place. They had no use for our modern-day corporate-speak, but were interested only in plain talk about the products they were seeking. Go to any street market today and you can still see this in action – vendors openly compete with each other for attention, but the language is simple and down-to-earth. Everywhere, you see merchants and customers talking, some of them about things unrelated to the products. The atmosphere is relaxed and the interaction between vendor and customer is very clearly a conversation.

Real marketing, when it’s boiled down, is just that: a conversation; the simple act of talking with our market – note that I say “with” and not “to”. I believe the distinction is an important one.

If we understand only one thing, it ought to be this:

Our clients want to talk with us in an open, honest and human way; free of fancy slogans and vague mission statements. They can smell corporate hype a mile away and will disengage at the first hint of anything phony.

The Web 2.0 has generated a surge in interactive web sites and, in particular, the rise of social media networking. Having a voice on the Internet and the ability to converse with others (even if the conversation is mundane) are the reasons why social media networking has become so popular. People want to talk, sometimes about nothing at all, but they also exchange information about their experiences with products, companies and services. This new breed of Internet user is practically immune to advertising and relies instead on the opinions and reviews of other users for information to help them make a buying decision.

The market right now is having a conversation mostly with itself – but it’s time for us to join in; we are even welcome as long as we obey the rules and check our company hype at the door.

If you aren’t already doing so in your photography business, you should be looking at using the power of social media networking to see how you can benefit. There are a lot of webinars, classes and workshops being run all over the place right now on this very subject. If you think that Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and all the other sites out there are just a passing fad, think again – social media offers something that has been unavailable until recently: the ability for anyone to have a voice and share their opinion about anything. Something that desirable is not going to go away, but only evolve and grow stronger.

Used properly, social media networking is like word-of-mouth advertising on steroids. On the other hand, it also has the power to sink a business overnight without a trace. It is simply that powerful and we can’t ignore it for much longer…

For more information on the idea of markets as conversations, check out this chapter of “The Cluetrain Manifesto” – a very interesting and thought-provoking read.

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