Shutterbug: Business Trends

SB: What advice do you have about connecting to your more traditional marketing tools (direct mail, e-mail marketing, advertising, personal selling)?

Chase Jarvis: This is not a short-term endeavor; I think that needs to be made clear, too. I think the only mistake people can be making is to not participate in some portion of the discourse. You can blog, you can have your Facebook page, you can have a Twitter account, you can have a YouTube channel, you can have all of these things, and they can all play together, but I think what’s important is to not ignore it because that’s where most information is going. Now I’m not going to be represented as saying “the old marketing is dead” because there’s always something to be said in print from a brand perspective. I think that it’s prudent to never underestimate the value of a really beautiful print piece, but I would rather send a $100 print piece to 10 people than a $1 print piece to 1000 people.

Christopher Winton-Stahle: Most clients are so overwhelmed with visual promotions that it’s nearly impossible for any one person to separate themselves from the crowd. I do find traditional mail to be effective in situations where you’ve established a relationship with the client or potential client via e-mail, Facebook, LinkedIn, or personal networking. For example, I’ve recently finished a campaign that I am very proud of. The final product is a 25-page booklet with beautiful full-page spreads. I am getting ready to do a new e-mail campaign featuring this project and will be directly targeting clients who I want to work with. I will handwrite a note with a few words expressing my gratitude for taking the time to review my work and let them know that I would like to be considered for projects in the future. After that, I will follow up with a phone call.

John Mutrux: I recommend that you learn how the various social-networking sites really work. I am convinced that not understanding the nuances of the options and tools available on the various services is limiting my effectiveness. Tools like Ping.fm (http://ping.fm) can save a lot of time by updating all of your social networks simultaneously. My belief is that it’s absolutely critical to understand that anything I write online will most likely never go away. I run a Google Alert (www.google.com/alerts) on my name and I’m amazed how often it finds things that I wrote years ago, as well as current stuff, like tweets. Fortunately, I’ve never committed any grievous “cyber faux pas” in my online career (that I’m aware of). But it may be impossible to escape certain embarrassing posts, so don’t make them.

Chase Jarvis: I think that the root of getting hired as a photographer/director depends on the images that you are making and what you’re doing for the marketplace. But there are many intangibles that go into it that I would place under the idea of brand or personality. A lot of that gets revealed through these social-media channels and this new technology. Whether or not your immediate clients are listening in on this conversation, this cocktail party, is really not the point. If you surveyed the spectrum of a couple hundred thousand unique people who tune into my blog on a monthly basis, you can argue that’s a larger subscription than all the photography magazines on the shelf. Are those folks all creative directors from Saatchi & Saatchi and McCann Erickson ad agencies who are my potential clients? Unlikely, but you can make an argument that many of the people who are going to hire you are listening in on the conversation. If they are, hopefully what they’re getting are the intangible things about how you work, your style, your personality, and your technical ability. If they’re not, what you are doing is building a brand. And that ultimately is more powerful than just trying to market through any sort of direct mail campaign or print advertising.

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