Ideas and Angles is proud to announce that we have teamed up with Traci Via of Trace Marketing in Blue Springs to teach social media marketing through the Blue Springs School District’s Community Education program! We are really excited to have this opportunity. We have been working hard to gather all the information and tools on the internet in order to present them in a logical way with a hands on approach. As many of you know, social media is a hot topic and using the tools can be a bit confusing. Our class will not only talk about the tools, but it will be held in a computer lab so the students will be participants and actually using the tools right there with us. Below is the course description as it reads in the Class Schedule Brochure:
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Social marketing through the internet has quickly become the fastest-growing component to small business marketing. This class will train you to utilize the new media marketing tools of bulletin boards, blogs, videos, photos, social networks, and other social media related web sites in your online marketing efforts. Build your online presence by learning how to use online tools to make your company’s communications more efficient. You will learn how to use sites such as, but not limited to, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Blogging, and Google. This class will be a hands-on experience where you will be working on a computer right along with the instructors.
Instructor: Zach Cobb, Chris Culbertson & Traci Via
Class # 305
Wed, Sept 30 – Nov 18 8 sessions 6:30 – 8:30 pm
Hall-McCarter, Media Center Fee: $89
Enroll Today! – call 816-224-1364 (limited availability)
To view more classes offered through Blue Springs Community Eduction visit their website.
We hope to sell the class out quickly and would appreciate your help in doing so. We encourage you to share this post with anyone you think may be interested by email or using your social media outlets!
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.
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. 
