The Pro Photo Business Forum

Have you heard the news about ShootQ? They were bought out by Pictage.

I have never been a big Pictage fan. I have heard the same story from multiple people using Pictage.

The story I hear is that a photographer will post images of a wedding, and then the photographer will inform the client that the gallery has gone live. The client then passes the access information to their friends and family so they can view the images. To get into the gallery, the guests must give their contact information, ie email address.

I then understand that Pictage will contact the guests without the knowledge of the photographer to try and sell/promote photographic products. I don’t know about you, but I feel I should be the only one contacting my clients.

So, I am concerned with Pictage having access to my database of clients. Time will tell if this fear is valid.

Let’s face it. Just about everyone out there is on Facebook. According to Facebook, roughly 45 million users log on every day in the United States. Everyone uses Google too though. So what makes Facebook so much more powerful? Connectedness. In a Big Brother-ish way, Facebook knows virtually everything about you. While Google can make good guesses about you based on your searches, you’ve actively told Facebook all kinds of things advertisers want. You’ve revealed your age, education, marital status, interests, and all kinds of other things that can help advertisers find you. Not only that, you’re linked to all your friends through updates, news feeds, tagging, and more. Facebook connects people in a way no other website ever has. While it’s a great tool for finding old friends, it’s an even better tool for helping photographers find new clients.

Facebook Ads for Photographers

One of the most powerful ways Facebook can aid photographers in connecting to potential clients is through ads. Unlike Google AdSense which requires you to pay for certain keywords, you pay for placement or clicks for a set of parameters in the user’s profile on Facebook. This allows you to target people who aren’t looking for wedding photographers. You can get your foot in the door before they even begin researching photographers.

Wedding photographers can easily target soon-to-be-brides who will likely be the type of client they’re looking for. On Google AdSense, when someone searches for “New Jersey Wedding Photographer” Google has no idea whether it’s a client or whether it’s just another photographer researching the competition and spending your ad budget. Neither does it know whether the person is looking for a $500 wedding photographer or a $5000 wedding photographer. But with Facebook, you can target women in 20 surrounding towns from 25-40 who have graduated from college. This type of person is likely to have a larger budget.

Senior portrait photographers can seek out married women from 40-55, the group most likely to have children graduating from high school. You can have ads appear for people on their birthdays offering them a birthday discount. The possibilities are truly endless. With Facebook ads, you can target the clients you want to find at the price you think they’re worth.

Facebook Fan Pages for Photographers

You don’t necessarily have to spend money to be a successful Facebook marketer. Facebook allows businesses to create a fan page for free. There you’ll have your own dedicated space to post photos, updates, and more. You can offer your fans exclusive discounts, keep them up to date on studio promotions, and much more. But where your fan page can really become powerful is when you start adding photos.

Facebook Photos for Photographers

Photos are arguably the most powerful way for photographers to use Facebook. Tagging allows us to get our photos from an event or portrait session seen by all the attendees and friends of the client. It’s basically free advertising. As easy as this is, many photographers are missing out on the opportunity by making a few fundamental mistakes.

The dos and don’ts of posting photos on Facebook:

Do:

• Watermark your photos with your studio name and website. In the event people choose to steal your photos, at least you’ll have your name and site on them. Don’t make the watermark too obtrusive, or people won’t want to look at the photos. Don’t make it too discrete either, or it might as well not be there.
• Upload the photos to your studio’s fan page. It should be easy for the viewer to navigate back to a page with your branded with your logo along with your phone number and website. A fan page has all of this.
• Shrink your photos to 604 pixels on the longest side. Facebook currently displays photos at a resolution of 604px on the longest side. If you resize your shots on your computer, although Facebook will still re-compress them, in my experience they will look better.
• Send the link to your client
• Ask that the client tag all people in the photos. This is key. This will ensure that everyone who attended an event will see the photos.

If you do all those things, you’ll be able to sit back and watch the comments, like, fans, and eventually clients stream in. But be careful not to make a couple of simple mistakes that could lessen your chances at winning new clients.

Don’t:

• Post your photos without watermarks. You’re just asking for them to be copied. When they are, they’ll be of no value to you without your branding.
• Upload your photos to your personal Facebook profile. This makes it difficult to find your business information.
• Send small JPEGs to the client and allow them to upload the photos to Facebook. Now no one can find your fan page. You will also not have control of the photos your client posts, whereas you can delete inappropriate comments and resolve other issues on your own photos.

That’s really all there is to it. With a small investment of money for ads and time to create a fan page and begin uploading your shoots, you can begin taking advantage of the tremendous opportunity Facebook provides photographers to reach out to potential clients.

With the power of today’s smartphones, we can conduct business from nearly anywhere with cell service. We can have our client database at our fingertips, our calendar available at all times, and our portfolio in our pockets. In the photo industry, potential clients don’t always come from 9-5, Monday through Friday. A smartphone like the iPhone allows us to stay in contact with other clients whenever we want, providing us with more opportunities to win new clients by spending less time in the office. While many of my tips and recommendations will focus on the iPhone, by far the most full-featured smartphone out there, a lot of the suggestions apply to other smartphones or even the bare bones freebie phones.

Portfolio

When the iPhone first came out, photographers drooled over its high-resolution glass display and the elegant photo

application that came with it. And still, showing off a portfolio remains one of the most popular uses of the iPhone for photographers. Your iPhone travels everywhere with you, so therefore so does your portfolio. Having a high quality mobile portfolio means you can win over clients in the field. The great thing about this is that you don’t have to have an iPhone. An iPod Touch will work just as well. If the local iPhone provider has bad service in your area or you are bound to an existing cell carrier, you can still carry around a stunning portfolio everywhere you go.

Personal Information Management with Daylite

Even though your iPhone can play movies and games and do all kinds of other great things, one of the most important uses of your phone is storing your contacts, appointments, and more. That’s where Daylite, from Marketcircle comes in. Daylite is a companion to a Mac-only application which handles virtually all of the informational needs of your business, minus accounting and invoicing (which Daylite partners with another company to provide). Unless the basic address books, calendar, and to-do list, Daylite features powerful Opportunity/Project and linking features which allow you to keep your information organized. All information in Daylite can be linked together. An appointment can be linked to a project or contact, one contact to another as referrer, referee, or any other relationship, and much more. All these features make it easy to keep your clients’ files together without having to resort to paper folders and oversized filing cabinets.

Daylite’s Opportunities feature allows you to store potential jobs, as well as link all kinds of data including email messages, appointments, phone calls, and more to that opportunity. When you book a client, you can easily convert that opportunity into a project, which functions similarly. Daylite has a myriad of advanced features including reporting, integration with MYOB AccountEdge and other accounting applications, and multiple users. It is an expandable solution which can be easily customized to fit any Mac-based studio’s needs. The desktop application starts at $189/user, but the real power begins with the iPhone application.

Daylite Touch is Marketcircle’s iPhone application which allows users to take their Daylite data on the road. Daylite Touch was created exclusively for use with the companion desktop application, and can be synced over the internet from anywhere with a 3G, Edge, or WiFi connection, not just from your local network. The iPhone app gives users the ability to view and modify virtually all the data stored within Daylite. From creating new opportunities when you speak with a potential client on the road to adding new tasks and linking them to their respective projects, Daylite Touch does it all.

Daylite Touch also adds some great little features, which while small, are invaluable when working from out of the office. When using the application, you can quickly dial a contact from your Daylite address book. The contact will be called using your phone, but the real power shows up after the call is done. Once you hang up, Daylite is immediately relaunched with a small window showing the duration of the call, and giving you two options: log, or schedule a followup. Daylite can automatically log the call, link it to the contact or project, and if you want, schedule a followup call for the future. I can’t begin to describe how helpful this is. No more searching through your recent calls to see if you gave a client a call the other day. With Daylite Touch, all your client’s information is available anywhere, on your iPhone. Daylite Touch is free on the App Store, but does require a $49/yr license to be added to your main Daylite server on your Mac.

Phone Call Management with Google Voice

Google Voice is a free service from Google which gives you a local phone number which can ring any phones you choose. I use Google Voice to manage my phones; with Google Voice I can answer a phone call in my office, transfer it to my iPhone, and walk outside without skipping a beat. The best part is: it works with any phone, landline or mobile. Google Voice offers advanced features which can be configured to do all kinds of great things. For example, it allows you to create different groups of contacts, and then have different settings including voicemail message and more for that group. With Google Voice, you can take your phone on vacation and set all calls to go straight to voicemail except your two important clients that you need to speak to. When they call, your phone will ring. You can even do things like set your office phone and your cell to ring during weekdays, but only your cell on weekends, but only between 10AM and 5PM. Google Voice is currently invite only. I was lucky enough to be one of the first people to get an invite when Google Voice went public. Google has just announced that it will begin allowing current users to send out invites. As soon as I have some invites to give away, I’ll be happy to share the love with anyone who comments and requests one.

Camera

It’s kind of ironic that out of all the things the iPhone can do, its great camera is mentioned last in an article aimed at photographers. The iPhone camera has come a long way, and in the latest 3GS model, has autofocus, great touch controls, and excellent automatic exposure and color. The iPhone does not offer up manual controls for the camera, so you’ll have to use an app to make the most of the photos after you’ve taken them. And that app is The Best Camera, from famous commercial photographer Chase Jarvis. Best Camera allows you to go through the whole process, from taking the photo, to adding effects, to uploading the image to Twitter, Facebook or other sites. The Best Camera is $2.99 on the App Store. A great camera in a phone is nice and all, but how can you use it to help your business?

Well, you could replace your brand new D3s with an iPhone 3GS and shoot weddings with it, although I can’t see that going over too well with the bride and groom. But that doesn’t mean you can’t shoot iPhone photos at events and use them to personalize your client’s experience. Clients appreciate a quick iPhone snap from an assistant that’s sitting in their inbox when they get home. Even if you have memory cards full of better images, they’ll love the personal touch.

iPhones are also amazing location scouting tools. The iPhone tags each photo with GPS coordinates, allowing you to scout a location, download the photos to your computer, and import them using special software which can overlay them on a map. I’m planning an extended shoot in New York City soon. Even though I did the scouting months ago, the locations are still fresh in my mind since I can pull up Google Earth and see all my photos pinned onto a map of Manhattan. While an iPhone won’t be replacing my dSLR soon, it certainly has an important place in my camera bag.

If I had to pick one piece of technology out of all of the electronic devices I have, it would surely be my iPhone. But this isn’t an ad for the iPhone. While I firmly believe the iPhone is leaps and bounds ahead of its competition, my advice is applicable for anyone, regardless of whether they own an iPhone or not. The point is: use technology to make working outside the office a seamless experience. Whether that’s on an iPhone or not is your choice. But I still recommend it!

For most photographer’s, their website is their primary tool for attracting new business. To help members improve their businesses and websites, we have a special forum dedicated to website reviews. However, the reviews that are given are based on the site’s ability to generate new business for the studio and not how esthetically pleasing the images are. When I give a review of a site, I like to create a five minute screen captured walk through. Here’s a fun example.