Zenologue

Do you send out a monthly email newsletter for your photography business? If so, kudos to you, this is another great way to “touch” your clients and prospects each month to keep your photography studio and your brand on their radar.

Perhaps the idea raises thoughts of, “I’d love to, but that’s all I need – more administrative work to keep me away from taking photographs!”

But then again, we need people in front of our cameras, right? In order to get those people where we want them to be, we need to market our services and get their attention. Not only that, we need to keep their attention once we’ve earned it.

If you aren’t sending out a newsletter, there are plenty of reasons why you should. Before I committed to sending one out myself, like many others, I was expecting Facebook, Twitter and my blog to do all the work that a newsletter should do. After all, it’s no big task to write a short blog entry to announce special portrait sessions. Adding a status update to Facebook is easier still and as for Twitter, well anyone can write 140 characters in their sleep, right? Plus, those things are a lot more fun than writing a newsletter – that sounds too much like being a journalist.

The problem with this approach (apart from being somewhat lazy) is that the people receiving your numerous status updates and tweets are just not paying attention to them as much as you would like them to. Your updates become lost in a continual parade of tweets and announcements that slide past your contacts glazed eyes all day long, small fish in a very big pond of other [mostly] small fish.

I’m sure you don’t need me to point out how frustrating it can be from a business standpoint to “yell” at Facebook and Twitter continually with no appreciable results. The reason people are not responding to us could very well be that we’re using social media incorrectly. Ideally, Facebook & Twitter should be used in a social way to augment and amplify our marketing message – instead, we appear to be using them as vehicles to carry our whole marketing message. Imagine if Walmart tried to deliver everything to their stores in VW Beetles, simply because everyone else thinks VW Beetles are cool. Theoretically, it could be done, but the vehicle is simply not suitable for that type of job, and it would not be the best business decision for Walmart.

So, here are 8 reasons why you probably need to send an email newsletter…

Reason #1: Concentrated Information

When someone opens your newsletter, they’re focused purely on that one thing (or at least as much as we can hope for in today’s age). They probably scan it for interesting headlines, and then an article on the benefits of wall portraits might catch their eye to read in more detail. Even if they don’t click any of the links, the amount of time they spend looking at it is enormous compared to a tweet, which now seems as insignificant as a blink.

The benefit of having your marketing information concentrated in a newsletter is that the reader has a chance to think about what you’re saying. They might read that interesting piece you wrote about your emotional approach to wedding photography. The overall message you want to convey becomes stickier when presented in a concentrated way like this, so the readers stand a better chance of remembering it afterwards.

Reason #2: Professional

A properly written email newsletter just looks more professional, and is one of the factors that can help set you apart from your competitors. When presented with a newsletter that appears polished, clean and professional, the reader will take more notice of what you have to say. In short, a professional newsletter adds credibility to you and your business and gives you more authority in your field.

Reason #3: Engaging

As long as it’s written correctly, your newsletter will be more engaging to your clients and will be much more effective than a barrage of status updates and tweets. If you are consistent (extremely important) and send one out on time every month, you will find that people become more engaged as time goes by, and will (hopefully) look forward to receiving it.

Consistency is a key factor – you do need to stick with it and keep going. You’ll find it’s exciting to send out the first one or two, then it gets more difficult and you might feel despondent at a poor response after the third or fourth one. But don’t give up. I guarantee that people are reading them and if you show that you’re in for the long haul, you will get responses.

Engaged clients, people who enjoy reading your newsletter, may also be more likely to pay attention to your other forms of marketing, such as Facebook posts, tweets etc. This is one of the huge benefits of marketing yourself through multiple channels – your name becomes more familiar and you start to become noticed and wanted.

Reason #4: Brand Loyalty

Along with engaging your clients comes the idea of brand loyalty, a powerful by-product of trust. If your clients trust you, they will buy from you again, and they will refer you to others. A good newsletter both educates and entertains your clients, augmenting their feelings of trust in you and your brand, leading to repeat business and brand loyalty.

Reason #5: Brand Recognition

Your newsletter can also help with brand recognition in your local marketplace. This is concerned more with how people perceive you and your business and how easily they recognize you. What are the things that enable people to recognize your photography business? It could be your style of photography, how you communicate your personality, the colors and fonts you use, the type of finished product you specialize in, and your logo of course.

All of these should be consistent across your whole business – including your web site, business cards, stationery, and your newsletter. By bringing your newsletter format into line with everything else, you are reinforcing your brand and improving its recognition.

Reason #6: Measurable Results

Before I get onto this one, a note of caution: If you’re sending out your own email newsletters, either manually or through a mass-mailing program, then stop! Unless you’re an IT person and really know what you’re doing, there is absolutely no need to waste your valuable time to reinvent the wheel, it’s already been done – and very effectively too. Even if you are a talented IT person, just go with those who specialize in doing this – concentrate on what you should be doing: Creating beautiful imagery!

I’m sure you already know that sending out email newsletters to anything more than a handful of people by yourself is a nightmare (probably one of the main reasons so many small businesses like photographers give up on it).

This is why I can’t stress enough the importance of using a reputable email marketing company, such as Constant Contact or iContact. They are dedicated to making sure your emails get through, provide amazing analytical metrics, and can ensure that you stay on the right side of the anti-spam regulations. The cost to you is minimal and well worth it. They even provide a wealth of templates with which to build your newsletters. One of the really great features is the ability to have HTML versions of your newsletters where others can see them directly without having to receive an email.

Measurable results includes such things as:

• How many emails were opened (open rate)
• Which email addresses were invalid (bounces)
• How many people clicked the links in your newsletter (click through rate)
• The number of times your newsletter was forwarded (forward rate)
• How many decided to opt-out (opt-out rate)

These are invaluable in giving you clues on how your clients are behaving and the kind of things they might respond to, allowing you to fine tune future mailings. For example, you can see exactly who clicked the link to a specific promotion and then further target those people with a more concentrated message.

Reason #7: It’s Not Easy To Write

This may not sound like a great reason to write a newsletter, but it’s one of the best ones out there! We already know that most photographers are not sending out regular newsletters to their clients. Some, with nothing but good intentions, start out boldly and then stop after a couple of issues because they either get discouraged at the lack of immediate results, or find that it’s harder to write than they first thought.

That, oddly enough, is great news for the rest of us. Being successful in business is not normal, nor is it easy. If writing a newsletter was that easy, everyone would do it and then it would not be as effective. But, if we force ourselves to tackle the task and get it done in as professional way as possible, I believe there are great rewards.

Yes, it takes time to write and format the email. Yes, it takes effort to think up articles. Yes, it takes a concentration of will to force ourselves to think creatively and not produce a newsletter that’s a sales letter (see next section). But, it is worth it to separate yourself from the pack.

Reason #8: People Want To Hear From You

The last reason on my list (but I’m sure there are many more) is that your clients really do want to hear from you! They like to get to know you personally a little better, find out what’s happening in your business and, more importantly, it makes them feel more appreciated.

If you keep your newsletters fresh, infused with your personality and, above all, interesting to read, your readership should grow nicely over time and your business will start to see positive results. Just don’t expect it to be an overnight success – it does take time.

One thing I will say is that your newsletter should NOT be a sales letter. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that a sale, monthly offer, or promotion by itself is a newsletter. Your readers will soon grow tired of receiving nothing but sales information and will quickly unsubscribe from reading it, leading to a damaged brand. This is probably more suitable in another article all by itself, so I’ll close this post for now.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this – if you did, please forward it on to someone else you think might benefit from it, through Twitter or Facebook etc.

Before I go, I’ve also set up a new Facebook Page for Zenologue, so you might want to check that out and join our fans.

Marketing email newsletter, facebook, Marketing, newsletter, photography business, social media, twitter

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…

Marketing facebook, google, LinkedIn, social media networking, twitter

One of the intriguing things about Twitter is its complexity disguised as apparent simplicity. On the face of things Twitter appears to be little more than a very simple communication system involving the exchange of short (often meaningless) messages, very similar in concept to a text message on a mobile phone. In fact, text messaging was the fundamental inspiration for Twitter in the first place. Under the surface, though, things are more complicated, with properties emerging from Twitter that may not have been foreseen in the beginning.

The Power Of A Few Words

Most tweets can be divided into one of several categories: 

• Mundane items of little interest to anyone with a life
• Attempts to sell get-rich-quick schemes
• Promises of thousands of new followers (none of whom are interested in you)
• Other types of spam
• Political and religious messages

But there are some that are completely different and are of a more advanced or intellectually satisfying nature. It’s this group of tweets that could potentially form the basis for a whole new world…

This small group of tweets has been used to compose poetry, write plays, spread news, warn other users of Internet threats, exchange product reviews, sway public opinion, influence political campaigns, reduce the spread of computer viruses and help people get released from foreign jails. The entire world seemed to grieve as a collective on the day Michael Jackson passed away, straining Twitter to its limits in the process; the list goes on.

All of this from answering the simple question of “What are you doing?”

I’m not sure that Jack Dorsey, the creator of Twitter, envisioned these emergent properties when he unleashed his creation on the world.

Ants Tweet Too

Complex emergent phenomena are usually the result of swarms, or crowds of individuals. Mobs and riots are one example, where the size of the “swarm” reaches a critical mass, resulting in the group suddenly acting in unison, usually in a violent or destructive manner.

Insect colonies are a prime example of swarming behavior, and watching Twitter is sometimes reminiscent of observing the social complexities of an ant colony. Individual ants by themselves are very simple creatures that operate by simple rules. There’s really no room in an ant head for a brain capable of understanding the principles of architecture or the strategies of waging war with enemy invaders. No single ant knows how to construct an entire nest, complete with tunnels, chambers, gardens, kitchens, nurseries etc. Yet, the swarm as a whole accomplishes this task with amazing ease and efficiency. The ant nest and its incredible structure is an emergent property of a swarm of individuals. Furthermore, the structure of an ant colony is not predictable in any way by examining individual ants.

People are quite different to ants, and most of them are somewhat more intelligent than an insect, but Twitter strikes me as a good analogy to an ant colony: Twitter is essentially a simple system with a few easy to understand rules. Yet the behavior of the Twitter system as a whole shows signs (albeit small ones at the moment) of emerging properties that are generated by its millions of users and the different ways those users are putting Twitter to work for them. 

What Are You Doing?

What causes Twitter to exhibit complex behavior from an apparently innocuous question where the answer must be in 140 characters or less?

The answer lies in Twitter’s basic concept – the communication of a text message. Text messaging and Twitter are basically the same. However, there is one major difference, and it’s that difference that makes all the difference in the world; it’s the electric spark that breathes life into the creature that Twitter has become. Text messaging doesn’t exhibit any complex emergent properties as far as I know; it’s a one-to-one messaging system. Twitter, on the other hand, expands and multiplies the influence of the text message into a powerful one-to-many system. This amplifies the message so that millions of people can potentially receive it almost simultaneously.

Let’s return for a moment to our comparison of Twitter users with ants. We can consider the ant’s chemical messaging as analogous to a tweet – “food this way”, “follow this trail”, “defend nest” etc. From this, we can imagine how no ant colony could function properly if ant-tweets were received by only a single ant at a time. Communication in ants, the foundation of their complex behavior, is by necessity a one-to-many system that both distributes and amplifies the message and causes complex behavior to occur. 

One Day Twitter Might Be As Smart As An Ant

Thinking about this further, I’m tempted to go out on a limb and suggest that an ant colony, with the benefit of millions of years of evolution, is way more advanced than Twitter is right now. Twitter, in its current state, is like an ant colony gone mad, where most of the messages are disorganized and obscured by meaningless noise. It’s as though all the ants in the colony are all spouting random messages at the same time in a raucous rabble. If that were to actually happen, the ant colony would probably collapse.

Being optimistic, though, I suspect that the overall signal-to-noise ratio of twitter will grow stronger as time goes by. Already, there are pockets of meaningful information out there. It’s a shame that much of that data is masked and drowned out by announcements of the eating status of millions of household pets or the endless repetition of inspirational quotes. Do ants make “noise” too? I’m sure that not all “ant tweets” are perfectly meaningful in the context of the collective need. If that’s true, how are the less useful or incorrect messages filtered out from the real signal to enable the colony to function as it does? If we can find the answer to that question, maybe we can learn how to apply that principle in “tuning” Twitter, to amplify the signal and quench the noise.

You Will Be Assimilated

As any fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation knows, one of the worst fates is to be assimilated by the Borg, a race of evil cybernetic humanoids organized into a swarm (“the collective”) and operating as a single organism. Assimilation meant being absorbed into the collective and becoming a part of the hive mind, sacrificing one’s individuality in the process. Not a pleasant thought for anyone.

While I doubt our own individuality is in too much danger of being assimilated by the Twitter universe, there are some striking similarities between the Borg and the fetal creature currently we know as Twitter.

For example, take the ability of many unrelated individuals in the network to unite as one, in a concerted effort to solve a problem. This happened recently when Demi Moore alerted her Twitter followers to a woman threatening suicide in San Jose. Within moments, the news spread, the local authorities were alerted, and tragedy was avoided.

Or, consider the Twitter Opera; a collaborative work constructed almost entirely of tweets. I’m not sure how “good” the opera turned out to be, but the main point is that it is a work of art made by otherwise unconnected individuals. The question remains of whether or not it is true art, unless it is somehow an expression of the collective consciousness that created it.

Then there’s the Twitter Psychic Experiment conducted by Professor Richard Wiseman. In the experiment, he asked volunteer Twitter users to try to “remote view” the location he was in and select it from a set of five photographs. In each run of the experiment, the collective decision was incorrect suggesting the remote viewing is not a real phenomenon.

Finally, I think one of the really interesting, and possibly useful, possibilities of something like Twitter is as a problem-solving machine…

Welcome To The Machine

We’ve already seen examples of using the Internet as a means for distributed computing. For example, SETI Online, the computational modeling of protein folding and the human genome project, all of which harness the power of many thousands of computers to process small portions of complex tasks that would take a very long time, even on a single supercomputer.

This caused me to wonder if Twitter could eventually be used as a problem-solving computer using principles similar to that found in the wisdom of crowds. Such problems could be the sort that traditional computing might be unable to solve; problems involving concepts that are difficult to express numerically or in a logical form.

Here is a very simple example (simple in the extreme, but it serves the point). “Do I take an umbrella with me to work today?” The answer depends mainly on how likely it is to rain where I’m going, but also on such factors as how much time I intend to spend outside, how windy it will be, how convenient it is to carry, where am I going, what alternatives there are to an umbrella, and so on. Can the wisdom of a crowd decide the answer to this kind of question intelligently? I think maybe it can, as long as the crowd doesn’t fall prey to anti-productive concepts that might lead to a herd mentality or collective irrational fears or prejudices.

This possibility raises some interesting questions, which others might want to try to answer (maybe through Twitter itself as a sort of meta-question).

How many followers might it take for us to effectively solve a qualitative problem that involves rationalization and reasoning rather than mathematical or logical processes? I’m sure the answer probably depends on the complexity of the problem and many other factors, such as when the question is asked.

Is the time taken to solve a problem directly proportional to the number of followers working on it, or might we see a synergistic, exponential or logarithmic effect? That is, would 10 followers be 10 times more effective than 1 at solving the problem, or 100 times more effective?

Conclusion

Twitter is still very much in its infancy at the moment, barely able to feed itself, let alone talk coherently. But it’s learning at a fast rate, and I don’t think it’s going to be too long before we start to see even more startling and amazing things come out of it that will catch us all by surprise.

As a very basic test, I posted a tweet that asked, “what is the square root of 12,345,678 to four decimal places?” Anyone with a calculator can work that out in a few seconds. Twitter took 28 minutes. Maybe the question wasn’t interesting enough to get an answer immediately, but the point is that it did answer the problem. At least it didn’t give me the answer of ‘42’, in which case I would have been a little concerned…

Is it possible that Twitter, or something like it, could be the future answer to artificial intelligence? Such an AI system would be made up of millions of independently smart nodes, each one autonomous in its own right, yet able to function as a small component of a much larger decision-making system. It would be like an ant colony where the ants are each as smart as people…

Maybe the question Twitter should be asking isn’t, “What Are You Doing?” It ought to be “What Do You Want Me To Do?”

General communication, complex system, emergent property, tweet, twitter