- Kansas City Social Media Club member Warren Sukemek gives some links to great write ups on ways to make Twitter work for you. Lots of good tips inside for Twitter beginners. Twiginners? No? Ok.
- Sprint honored for its tremendous progress in customer service. As KC’s official Social Media Business Watch Dog we have definitely noticed some efforts locally and nationally by the phone giant to use social media strategies to engage customers. Props to some their employees like @JGoldsborough who have done a great job of using Twitter to create relationships and assist customers on behalf of Sprint.
- Diane Stafford at the Star has a good write up about using networking and recommendations to help others land jobs. I+A always stresses the value in being a connector. We hear every time you connect one person’s business needs with another a puppy gets a loving home. This has yet to be confirmed.
- Tony’s Kansas City gets KC’s “Best Of” award from the Pitch readership. This city absolutely loves to hate TKC. People get so wrapped up lashing out against the negative, abrasive, and mean spirited style of the blog’s author. They don’t understand that they are taking in a wealth of news and information about Kansas City they may not have consumed otherwise. Props to Tony. I+A has never connected with a ‘glass half empty’ style of thinking but we respect the effectiveness.
In a way this is frustrating. We peaked early. We reached the nexus of the social media world. No social media strategy can have a better result than free beer. This is as good as it gets and team I+A got there.
Highlight Midwest has worked to put together a set of meet ups surrounding the event to encourage everyone getting to know each other on a more personal level to make for a better event, better networking, and most important more fun. The first meet up is the night before HM at the Flying Saucer. Chris and I set out last Friday to have lunch and enjoy a beer or two at FS because we enjoy the joint. After we were done and the place cleared out a bit (it was real busy when we got there) we took some video and figured we could put something together that would build some excitement and also help people know what to expect.
We threw the shots together in Chris’ KCFit.net office and uploaded it to a Vimeo page made for Highlight Midwest. People seemed to enjoy it, and then I got a message from HM’s resident ‘man behind the curtain’ Pete Thomas that the GM of the Saucer would like to buy HMers a free round of their ‘fire sale’ beer that evening for choosing the Flying Saucer encouraged by the video.
HMers can clink a cold adult beverage to social media. Content is king and rich media content that has a straight forward message provided in a way that is interesting and makes the user “connect” with the video is a powerful tool that all businesses need to harness if it works within the framework of their social media strategy.
Update (3:26): Family Friend @spike_jones reports there is no actual news but there are indeed leads. Also stresses this is not an Amber Alert situation, doesn’t believe girl was abducted. Search for McKenzie Church continues.
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I am currently tracking a story that everyone hopes will turn out alright about McKenzie Church. There is a 14 year old girl in South Carolina that has been missing. Her father is a twitter user and a friend of his sent out a tweet about the situation in hopes others would retweet.
The community has responded at amazing levels. The first message put on Twitter was from @orangejack at around 11:30am eastern time. The message started spreading. Only 4 hours after the original tweet I scanned anyone passing on the message doing a search for the father’s twitter name*. The message or some form of it was being retweeted at a rate of 250+ tweets every 5 minutes!
The ability for people to process and pass on information using Twitter and other social media tools is changing everything.
Our thoughts are with families involved in this. We are all wishing for the best. Click here (could be down because of traffic issues) and here for more info on the girl and her search.
*This is not a scientific search. I put the father’s username that was a part of the original tweet and put it into twitter search. Once that search was in I started counting to 5 mins and read the number it tells you how many times this search term has shown itself since you last searched. I did this 5 times and got an average of about 250 tweets every 5 mins.
Ran across one of the better explanations of what Twitter. Reccomended for those still getting a feel for social media and its tools.
(Via Jennifer Laycock at Search Engine Guide)
Last month at fall SBMU here in Columbus, I was trying to explain Twitter to some folks in my social media session who weren’t familiar with it. Since I’m a big fan of analogies, I spent the week before the show trying to come up with a quick and easy way to explain Twitter. The thing that kept popping into my head was the idea of a wall of Post-it notes. If you’re still having a hard time understanding Twitter, hear me out for one more explanation.
Tracking the Conversation
There are millions of people in the world with thoughts, opinions and questions. Some of them say things you’ll want to hear, others don’t. Some will occasionally talk about you, others won’t. Some will occasionally ask you questions or tell you things, and others won’t.
The question is, how do you keep track of all these conversations?
Read the rest of the article with photos included here.
The excitment for HM just keeps building and building. The travel plans are being set and twitter hashtags are cascading across social media streams. There is still space available for the October 29th event.
- Ideas and Angles will be presenting at the focused highlights session during the day to discuss some of the things we have been learning and some of our thoughts on how to help small businesses use social media to improve their overall marketing plans and customer interactions.
-Chris will be presenting the Kansas City overview at the evening reception bringing together all the Kansas City projects into the mix.
- Zach and Chris will be sitting on the post presentation panel in the evening dicussing actionable items along the terms of ‘What Now?’
Highlight Midwest
Thanks to a good friend of I+A and the event’s New Media Correspondant Jeff Smith for putting together this Highlight Midwest information stream to help keep track of the daily happenings as we get closer to go time.
Twitter has shown itself to be an important tool for fun, business, or anything in between (always best when you don’t have to choose between the two). The folks at Twitter have been nice enough to let everyone use a custom background in addition to some of the new designs they have provided with their recent update.
This gives you a great chance to extend your personal branding (examples here and here) abilities to a place where a lot of people could be taking in your message for the first time. We have no problem with the default look of Twitter but take that extra step and throw your logo or company name on there. We have put together a simple Photoshop (PSD) file to use as a guide. It is plenty big to make sure people with large resolutions don’t see any abrupt ends and has a guideline on the left side showing how much space you have for your own creativity before the twitter box begins.
Once you are in photoshop delete the layer with Ideas And Angles stuff and make the image your own.
Download the .zip file containing the .psd twitter background template.
For extra assistance…
How to change your twitter background image. (Via Twitter’s Official Support Page)
Something we have not done a great job of is linking to other blogs we have been reading and really building the community around us. This morning I read ‘Inserting a Link in a Blog Post‘ at BlogForProfit and it got me thinking…I know how to, but I have not been doing it. So I am starting by linking to this post. I hope it helps some of you out there that are just getting started with blogging. BlogForProfit is a must read if you are a small business or just beginning your journey in the blogosphere.
Alanis Morissette would say this post is ironic, but we are smarter than that.
Link your blog to this post which links to the ‘Inserting a Link in a Blog Post’ and have your readers link to your post. It might be fun. A new blogger would really get the point if they clicked through a bunch of these links to see lots of great blogs and eventually get to see how to insert a link of their own.
As a social media enthusiast and a freelance photographer this post sent all my synapses firing. Great read about community building and using proffesional networking to raise all the boats.
(Via Pro Photo Life)
It‘s Wednesday already, a day when we usually talk business. A couple weeks ago I mentioned possibly “downsizing“ my photo studio, Daylight Photo. Since then I‘ve received some wonderful input on the subject. Faithful readers Jan Klier and Juan Bonilla have suggested the benefits of possibly renting out part of Daylight Photo to other photographers, either full-time or on a “time share” basis in order to cut expenses. This kind of system is working well for Jan, he is currently part of such an arrangement. Juan (another Cincinnati photographer) pointed to how a local photo studio has just recently revamped and rebranded themselves as River Imaging.
River Imaging is a photo co-op consisting of three commercial photographers and a professional post-production provider. They’ve assembled a great deal of talent under one roof and have a beautiful, large (very large) studio space to offer clients. There are two primary goals of the co-op:
1. To cut expenses for the individual photographers. As they point out in this article in the Cincinnati Enquirer, local clients are actively cutting advertising budgets so reducing overhead only makes sense. They’re going about it by splitting up expenses among several photographers.
2. Forming a team of this sort will give them the ability to handle larger jobs than they could land individually, creating new marketing possibilities.
I was just down at River Imaging last week (it’s only five minutes from my house) talking to Randy Hoover, the food specialist, about the new venture. Randy is really excited about their potential and this concept appears to be a great fit for him (he explains the benefits in the aforementioned Enquirer article). He was getting ready for their grand opening party to be held the following night (the same night I’d be hosting 35 of my fellow area ASMP photographers at Daylight Photo for our every other month Pints ‘n’ Pixels get-together…great turnout, sorry you missed it, Ryan!).
The whole venture has been pulled together by Al Lang, a well-established, well-respected Cincinnati photographer and all around nice guy. My business partner, Bob, and I met with Al over a year ago regarding the concept but didn’t feel it was quite the right fit for us. Our overhead atDaylight Photo is already low enough that it wouldn’t be a huge financial savings by partnering and we’re tending toward simplification. Much of our business is based on being nimble and reacting quickly so we weren’t sure how it would work scheduling around additional photographers. While it can be exciting to grow a business, our recent experiences have us tending toward becoming “leaner and meaner”.
There’s a lot to be said for the potential benefits of partnering with other photographers and creating a larger entity. I wish them the best and would love to see this become a successful business model. Most photographers are downsizing so they may be on to something by providing services above and beyond what most studios are capable of. One of the keys is finding the right combination of photographers and it appears they’ve accomplished that. Now it’s up to the marketplace to decide if it’s the path to photo business success.
Sometimes it’s nice to just “change gears“. So many of the great photographers have distinctive stages to their careers…Richard Avedon, Annie Liebovitz and Gordon Parks. Just as River Imaging has chosen growth as the path to their collective success, I’m getting more and more excited about the thought of reinventing. More than anything I’d like to get back to my first love of photography and begin exploring more documentary and editorial work. Editorial photography doesn’t go very far toward paying the overhead of a studio so we only accept a few such jobs a year, eschewing it for work that goes toward paying the bills. Without the commitment to a large studio I’d be free to go after much more of that type of work.
A large part of that appeal has been inspired by you, the readers of prophotolife. I’m seeing so much wonderful photography that you’ve created just for the love of photography, not because you‘re getting paid to do it. It’s inspiring me to really dig down to rediscover my photo roots.
Shoot, now we‘re right back to “the grass is always greener“! Regardless of what I’m shooting 3-6 months from now, I hope to have you all still along for the ride, learning together as we go. 
