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Late this morning, my last train chugged into Union Station here in San Diego, and now I’m playing catch-up with the piles on my desk and in my email in-box. It’s amazing what can accumulate over a week (okay, 9 days) and add to that the connections made at SB2 and my usual work, and I’m going to be a busy girl for a while. But, as Stewart Smalley might say, that’s okay. It’s a good busy. Articles to write and new friends and clients to get to know better, etc., I can hardly think of a better way to spend my working hours.

One thing I have been missing is keeping up with this blog. During my presentations at SB2 last weekend, I’m afraid I may not have made clear just how important regular posting is if you have a blog–verbal or photo. These can be great tools, especially the photoblog for photographers (your clients don’t care so much about your words and thoughts in verbal form, they’d rather just see more images), but if you don’t keep up with them, they won’t do you any good at all. 

So, if you are going to blog, in any form, you must post regularly and fairly often. If someone comes to your blog once, likes it, and then comes back only to find that there is nothing new, you stand a good chance of losing that newly-minted “fan.” Twice, and they will almost surely bail. Of course, you can mitigate this by posting “I’m going on vacation” or “I’ve got a big shoot and won’t be able to post for a week” or “I’m going to be traveling for a speaking engagement” and people will forgive the lull, but generally speaking, you’ve got to give your fans something new.

Hopefully, you will enjoy the process. If you don’t, you shouldn’t blog. I know it’s one of my favorite parts of what I do, so when I don’t get to, it bothers me. But now I’m back, and back at it. 

Thanks for your patience during my absence. And thanks to everyone from the SB2 Chicago event–it was amazing. More on that…well…in another post. 🙂

I’ve been wanting to post about this but have been completely ensconced in the final SB2 until now–Giulio Sciorio in Phoenix is an interesting person and photographer. He is always thinking and he has come up with an idea that is going to piss off some people, but I bet it gains him a bunch of recognition. How it all will pay off in the end? Who knows. The idea? Take a hi-res version of one of his images and “remix” it yourself and share the results. More on his blog here.

 

I’m heading out again tomorrow afternoon for the final ASMP SB2 event, in Chicago. This one really is it, folks–if you haven’t gone yet and don’t go to this one, you will have missed out.

As usual, though, travel means that I’ll be less in touch for a while. More trains, more time traveling across areas where the iPhone doesn’t always get a signal, then the time at the event when, frankly, I’m just too busy to do anything but SB2-related stuff. My husband doesn’t even hear from me during the weekend, usually. 

I’m a bit misty about this event, it being the last one and all. It has been such an honor and a joy being a part of SB2 that I will miss it. The team has been fantastic–it will be odd not seeing everyone again a few weeks later. And though it has been a ton of work, and physically exhausting as well (I never get my 7-8 hours sleep during those days), I wouldn’t have traded the experience for anything. 

I’ve described it as what I would think running a 4-day marathon must feel like. Afterwards I am wiped out, but it is that good exhaustion–happy, excited, content-with-the-world kind of feeling. We do a post-event meeting after each city to talk about how it went and to see if we can make any tweaks for the next one. Mostly, we talk about the people who attended and what they shared with us. And always we have the overwhelming feeling that we are incredibly lucky to get to interact with such an amazing group of individuals in each location. 

So, I’m off to Chicago and looking forward to meeting the well over 250 people signed up already for the event. And seeing my team members. And you readers will have to be patient while I’m on the road. It’s just this last one and then I’ll be in my office for a while.

Tom Fishburne nails some of our clients, and their clients. 🙂

The evolution continues. 

I was one of the first people I knew with email. I have an older brother who is an über-geek (two brothers, actually, and both nerdy geeky comp-u-philes, in the Apple-ish way) who I remember telling me about email (his old Compuserve account/email was something like 11@…and those accounts were numbered in order of sign-up) and, because I was a student at Ohio State at the time, let me know that I could get an account through the school. I did, and was one of the early “cool kids.” 

From there things quickly evolved into text-based bulletin boards and then the earliest of web pages and before you knew it, I was getting a graduate school paper’s grade lowered because I used the internet for research and, as the French Culture professor noted, it wasn’t legitimate.

Fast-forward and now we have, essentially, entire universities online…good ones too. Even more importantly, we have entire communities of discourse we couldn’t have envisioned. People are talking to each other–people who might only have met at a conference, maybe–and they are sharing information at a rate unimaginable.

We have fabulous forums like APAnet and ASMP Pro. And I think people should participate on them, even when it means having to deal with some people who have their heels firmly dug into the past. But now were seeing amazing dialogue in other places–namely blog comments. 

The discussions on sites like APE and Heather Morton’s blog have been incredibly enlightening as of late. And this is the direction communications are moving. It’s hard to keep up, in some ways, but we need to make the effort. I’d like to encourage more of you to participate on this blog and on others. 

I approve almost every comment–I only have two rules: no personal attacks (on anyone) and you have to be identifiable to me enough to be clear that you are not some spammer. As long as you don’t violate those rules, your comments will get through. 

The point is, as communications evolve, so to must we. We have more to read, watch, listen to, all provided on the ‘net. And almost all of these points of contact provide us with opportunities to grow and to grow our businesses. But it’s about participating in the conversation.

People who sit on the side and wait to get asked to dance, so to speak, will soon become irrelevant. If you’re shy, now is the time to get over that. Be a part of the conversation–help to shape it. 

 

 

If you have loads of time, make sure to check out the Coudal Partners site. There is all sorts of great stuff there. I am particularly fond of the Museum of Online Museums. Plan on getting sucked in and spending hours with those links.

I found the airhorn museum particularly interesting as it seems there’s an entire class of airhorns called “Leslie.” Considering my love of trains, that’s fitting.

*****

There is also another art buyer blog to follow. Caitlin is US-based and calls herself an Art Producer in the title of her blog, but what she actually does is very Art Buyer-esque, too. Definitely worth checking in on, like her recent post about Woody Allen suing American Apparel for using an image of him without permission. She lets readers know that sometimes the creatives get frustrated because the art buyer has to tell them “we can’t do that,” but when an AB says that, she’s (usually) covering everyone’s ass. It’s part of the job to make sure their company, and the client, doesn’t get sued like that.

*****

And then here’s an interesting series of interviews about the future–the future of marketing and advertising in particular, and it really touches on several important points photographers (and all creatives) need to think about for their own businesses’ futures. These are the problems for which you will need to be part of the solutions.

Oh, and if any of you says something like “yeah, but a bunch of these people aren’t American so it doesn’t apply” I will personally bitch-smack you–our industry *is* global and what someone in, say, Sweden or Japan says is relevant to what we do.  

 

You want to know why I keep harping about making your best art and putting that out there? Here’s why.

It’s effing brilliant, and terrifying, and exhilarating, and full of possibilities.

Time to wake up, people. 

 

(hat tip to Steve Hardy from Adlist)

Every day I get a digest of advertising-related news in my email. It’s called “The Brief” (put out by Pile and Company) and at the end of each day’s email they include a quote. I particularly like today’s:

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputations… can never effect a reform. 
–Susan B. Anthony 

In other words, if you don’t put yourself out there, you will never be anything special–you will leave no legacy–you will change nothing. 

It’s hard to start putting yourself out there as something individual. We as a society, and possibly as a species, seem to crave conformity. But it is those of us who do not conform but rather who challenge the status quo who become the leaders.

And though we (society) act as a group in so many ways, we laud the innovators; but, by definition, an innovator must create something new and creating something new challenges conformity. 

As the King of Siam (from The King and I) would put it: Is a puzzlement. 

Yes, it is. But we know the only possible workable answer: be (honestly) yourself and push conformity–make your art, your way. Put that out to the world. For as they say, it is better to be hated for who you are than loved for who you are not.*

I know, someone is going to say “But I need to feed my family and can’t afford to be hated!” Well, I’m sorry, you picked the wrong profession then. Being an artist is one of the hardest ways to make a living out there and if you choose to do it, you can succeed ONLY if you create original work. And, if you create original work, someone will hate it. You can’t please everyone. So stop hitting your head against that wall. Let go of trying to please everyone and your work will get better. Better work will attract better clients (if you market it). That’s your road to success.

 

 

(*I can’t find the source for that quote, btw)

 

We really must have big money brains that are highly suggestible. Someone has done research that shows that exposure to the Apple logo will make you think more creatively. 

This is NOT an April Fools. Apparently it was headline stuff in the UK a few days ago.

(Oh, and exposure to the E! channel’s logo causes one to behave less honestly than exposure to the Disney logo…Paris Hilton anyone?)

I was thinking of writing a post today, but it being April 1st and all, I decided that if I wrote something important, it would get lost in the pile of fake news spreading in our industry like that Kodak bought the Getty archives–to reclaim the silver (on APAnet), or Annie L. giving away her images on Flickr (thanks Rob–that was a hell of a way to wake up today!).

So I think I’ll just stay on the sidelines today and work on my next book. It’s all about the passionate forbidden love between a commercial photographer and his perky young digital tech. Or marketing. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which.