Intuit said it was fixed, but it wasn’t completely. They’ve released a new update that is really supposed to fix it. More here:
http://www.macworld.com/article/131397/2008/01/quickbooks.html
Agency life
Want a little (okay, twisted and Canadian) insight into what it’s like to be a creative in an agency? Check out this comic. Make sure to view some of the past entires as well. And be careful drinking and clicking as you may end up with sinus-filtered liquids on your Mac.
Let go
The new year means, among many other things, that I start a new folder of business stuff for the year. My 2007 business folder was automated to back up to an off-site server whenever I typed a simple command into Terminal, but for the new folder, that would have to be changed. Trouble is, I use my Mac as a tool and know nothing about things like nano (at least I knew it wasn’t an iPod reference) and other Terminal-ish stuff.
So I emailed my tech support guy. In my case, that is luckily my brother and he immediately sent me the changes. They were incredibly simple to do in the end, but I required something like 8 emails between us and a phone call to walk me through the process before I got it right.
This is a very small example of where hiring other professionals makes great sense. I should not, ever, do anything tech-ish with my Mac. If it needs to be done, it is a much better idea for me to hire a pro (even if that is my brother) to do it than to try and learn it myself. I do not need to know what “nano” is or “rsync” or whatever.
You photographers need to learn when to let go too. Now, it may make sense for you to learn more tech stuff than I need to because of how you need to use your machines. But it does not makes sense for you to learn, for example, how to use some website building application. Why? Because you don’t *need* to know that information. Knowing how to use the app doesn’t mean you can build an effective and well designed website; just like a dentist knowing all the technical details for how his Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III works doesn’t mean his images will be great.
Learning things you don’t really need to know is often a way to get in your own way of success. We think that by learning how to build a site we can save ourselves money by doing it ourselves or that we can style our own shoots or that we can design our own promos. But in all of those cases, you will end up with results that will not be as good as if they were done by a pro. Worse yet, you will spend much more than than you think doing these things, time you could better spend shooting new work and exploring your vision or making calls or researching new targets, and your time costs you money!
You are not free. Your labor is not free. Your thinking is not free. It either costs a client or it costs you whenever you do anything in your business. It is much better for your business for you to hire a pro than for you to do tasks for which a pro is better suited. You will end up saving money. The end result will also probably be better.
This is also true for a lot of your general marketing tasks. If you don’t make calls or don’t get your mailers out on schedule or don’t update your lists, etc., regularly, then you should consider hiring a Marketing Assistant to do that work for you. Let’s say you hire an MA for 5 hours a week at $15/hour–that’s $75 which we’ll add 50% to cover hidden costs related to having an employee (though that is probably much higher than necessary if you are not offering healthcare insurance)–$112.50 a week. Isn’t not having to screw around with labeling and mailing and updating lists and making calls, etc., worth it? Couldn’t you find better ways to spend those 5 hours yourself?
Let go of the stuff you don’t need to do yourself. You’ll business will thank you.
What everyone does
People ask me all the time what everyone does–emails, mailers, etc. They want to know exactly what other photographers’ pieces look like and ask questions about specific results for each piece. They do this so that they can emulate what others have done successfully.
I think that’s a really bad strategy. In fact, I think it is so bad that I do not show examples of photographers’ marketing pieces (generally) when I lecture. Why? Because too many photographers lock in on that one piece with the success story and try to copy it. I’m not kidding…I used to show examples and then later I would get emails with new promo ideas that looked EXACTLY like what I showed.
Here’s the trick: Do your own thing to get noticed.
Look at these examples of innovative business cards–notice how different they are (mostly) and how compelling they are? Several are photographers’ cards (yea!) but they don’t look at all the same. I’d bet dollars to donuts they were all created by professional designers and not a photographer playing with a Mac. They also all have a concept (some are stronger than others, of course, but still). One concept. And one that clearly defines that company or person.
That’s what you need to do for your marketing materials–conceptualize and execute in a way that best represents your business. Don’t look at those examples and say “I’m going to do a metal card like Duffy’s!” or “I’ll do the folded card thing like ‘Scott’ did” but rather be inspired to originality by these examples.
Email Marketing
Maria Piscopo has another great article in Communication Arts (if you don’t subscribe, you should) and it is also available online. This one is about email marketing and it makes some very important points–like that you have to offer something more than just a promo to make it work best for your business.
Music
Recently on one of the photographer forums there was some discussion about using music with slideshows or on a website. The slideshows were mostly in the context of wedding clients or other direct-to-consumer work, and the websites were both for that market and commercial (editorial, corporate, advertising) photographers.
Now, I can totally understand photographers wanting to use music with their images. Many photographers are musicians themselves (at some level) and MTV changed the way we as a culture view both images and music–combining them so that not having them together seems almost odd in some ways. It seems to make sense to use sound to complete the sensory experience as much as possible–if you could do smell, taste, and touch too I think many of you would.
However, music is often NOT a good idea for marketing your images, especially on websites. First off, many buyers are in open office environments and so sound is not welcome. Secondly, your musical tastes may be very different from your buyers and that can result in your buyers having negative reactions to your work just because they hate the music. At the very least it can be distracting–there have been some studies recently examining listening to music (as well as things like audio books) and driving. The data indicate that sound distracts the driver significantly. In other words, drivers have a hard time concentrating on what they see when they have non-driving sounds (i.e., car and street noise) in their heads. We can make a not-too-huge leap of logic to conclude that music may distract from concentrated visual-related actions, like reviewing images.
Now, I will make a small break from my main point of no music on websites to say that if you have a wedding business, using music can be a good thing. The bride (and her mother, usually, maybe the groom) want to imagine their perfect day and that includes music. Picking the right music is important, but it can work.
But for commercial sites, I’d say “no” to music…if for no other reason than this last point: you probably are using that music illegally.
You must license music to use it on your site. There are no excuses for NOT doing this. It makes me so frustrated to hear photographers saying things like “I’m not selling the music so why should I pay for it!” or “It’s promotion for the musician–they get a credit line!” or “I put a link to their site, that should be enough!” Let’s see…where have we heard those lines before…oh yeah, I remember, from every site owner who uses images illegally! Pot/Kettle/Black…mean anything?
Look, you cannot base your business of selling licenses to reproduce intellectual property (your images) and then not respect others’ intellectual property rights–writers, illustrators, designers, and, yes, musicians. You can’t complain about the unfairness of having to license other creative work and then demand it for your own work. It’s simply wrong. It doesn’t matter if the recording industry is corrupt and the artists get pennies from a license (have you seen what some photogs get from stock sales these days?)–it is the law and, more importantly, it is fair and ethical to stand up for intellectual property rights for all if you are in this business.
Oh, and you must license any of this material for use in slideshows, too–whether as a promo, on a disc with images you are delivering to clients after a shoot, or (especially), for anything that will be shown to a group–like at a wedding.
So, I suggest dropping music from most/all of your materials and, if you are going to choose to use music in any way, license it for that use. It’s not hard to do (most commercial tunes are licensable via BMI or ASCAP).
If only photo licensing were as simple. 🙂
Happy Holidays!
As is my tradition, Burns Auto Parts purchased a big load of games (no Prozac) for the San Diego chapter of Toys For Tots. The donation was made in the name of all my clients and friends, as a way of thanking you for all your support–passing the good stuff on to others.
I couldn’t do what I do without you. Thank you, deeply, for another successful year.
As is also tradition, BAP will be closed from the 24th until January 2nd, so let me take this opportunity to wish you all a happy new year and a successful 2008!
A Creative Lube for Your Lover
There’s a new Creative Lube available (free, as always, and also available on iTunes) but this one isn’t for you creatives directly–it’s for people like me who are romantically involved with a creative. So go download it and give it to your spouse/lover/partner.
37 Signals on Self-Promotion
Great post about “getting ink” from 37 Signals. I’m particularly fond of the quote from Steve Martin. I saw him recently interviewed and he made the same point there. It’s a good one.
Quickbooks Pro Major Bug!
If you are using Quickbooks Pro 2006, Mac version, DO NOT run it! It seems that there is a bug that is deleting data! Here are two links for more info: