It’s about the personal brand.
There is a certain language that we are developing around business and our expectations as owners and customers. They include terms like relevancy, authenticity, and accountability. The days of hiding behind a logo or a companies policies are waning as more information, and the speed and accuracy of that information, becomes accessible not only to your customers but the whole world. It is more important than ever to look to the local community to build trust and develop relationships based on openness. Why? Because it can save your ass when you mess up, and you will mess up. These relationships will be that attachment to the human part of you that will allow for your customer to forgive you as a person. Really, lets face it, it is easy to hate a compnay (or a person) that claims no fault and easy to forgive your friends.
It’s about you.
As a photographer, it is the purpose of any portrait to capture that moment when you are most human, most yourself and exactly like you imagine yourself at your best. A good portrait will develop trust and convey meaning beyond what you can tell people about you or your brand, in this way a photo is a 1000 words. The avatar is this concept times a million, especially if you are involved in the communities on twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc. With people actively tweeting on average 10-20 times a day, that is a lot of seeing your poorly chopped and shopped photo for your followers and it makes a difference.
The deal.
I am the best portrait photographer in Phoenix and I want to photograph your avatar. I think it is vitally important to your business or personal brand especially if you are using any of the tools mentioned above. The normal price for personal portraits is $300.00+tax (see pricing page on tysoncrosbie.com for full details) and you get one image for use across all media from the session. I am offering an avatar session and one avatar image for use across all digital media for $150.00+tax. This isn’t entirely a discount, just a product I don’t normally offer. I am offering this product through the summer, it will end 08/31/08. This is a chance to get a photo session from me at 50% the normal starting cost. Obviously if you want more of the images from the session they will always be available in whatever format you would like.
Ready? Call me at 602.254.2880 for an appointment.
Not ready yet? Check out the soft edits page if you want to see what the Phoenix community thinks about avatars.
If you are a past avatar session client please leave a comment on this post incase others need help deciding. 
Thanks.
As a reward to those who comment and participate in the soft edits I built this badge that you can proudly display on your site.
Thanks to @denthewise and @stevebelt For encouraging me to build this badge.
The new badge:
Just copy and paste this code into your widgets/blogs or anywhere else you would like to:
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tysoncrosbieedit"><img src="http://www.tysoncrosbie.com/badge/commentbadge.gif" border="0" alt="Phoenix Photographer, Tyson Crosbie" width="200" /></a>
Thank you to all who view, comment and participate in the soft edit process. I am certainly grateful for your help and all those who have participated in crowd sourcing their own avatars have all loved the feedback. You have made a difference, and isn’t that the point of participating?
AVATAR: An incarnation, embodiment or manifestation of a person or idea.
A traditional headshot in the past was used to present an image of professionalism to potential clients and business partners. The likelihood of anyone outside of this narrow group ever seeing the image remained minimal at best, your pr firm may have used it in a brochure or even put it on your business card. Traditionally these business portraits were used to build trust with people who may not have constant contact with you, professions like lawyers and real estate agents frequently updated their headshot to show their client they can still smile. (okay that last part was a dig from me.)
Google changed everything. Now it is standard practice to google new hires and potential clients prior to meeting them and see the drunken pictures from that frat party in college on your myspace page and the business headshot in the brochure. There is a merging of personal and professional lives that is more often than not referred to as Personal Branding or Gary Vaynerchuk- (made you look)
The definition for avatar above seems to cover a lot of ground and is generalized for many different applications. Let’s define it for us: A social media avatar is an online representation of who you are online. It may be a logo, text, image or picture, it may even be nothing at all. For me it is a quick way to identify contacts on my IM client or filter a constant stream of information on twirl. For most of us online an avatar is a square image that should simultaneously embody your self image and your perceived self along with representing who you are to your closest friends and how you want to be perceived by strangers.
Look at your current Avatar– Is that image really accomplishing these tasks?
There are almost as many ways to use social media tools as there are people using them.
One of the ways I am trying to use these tools is to open up the process of photography to my audience. I recently started a new flickr account called tysoncrosbieEdit, it is a place where an audience can go to see a soft edit from a photo shoot and through participating there can make a difference in the final decisions. MsHerr for example posted on her blog an open invite to her community to crowd source her final selection. Effectively leaving the entire process of selecting her online identity to an audience that already interacted with her in this online space. A brave move certainly, but when considering personal branding in social media it is important to understand the perceptions of your audience as well as you understand your own motivations for using this space and the only way to gain that understanding is to allow for participation.
Whether we like it or not education changes us, and the experience of participating (even if it is just to say “I like this one.”) garners understanding. The end result is a community that understands the tools and the process, and that community is better equipped to make judgments when hiring their next photographer. It is this potential to educate a broader audience about good photography vs bad that really excites me.
Participation requested below, leave a comment and help me understand.
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