Building a community through education and transparency.
A soft edit is usually the first step a photographer will take after a photo session. I like to wait a couple hours and return to the whole session and look over the images one by one. Being very particular about what is in and what is out. For me I usually eliminate about half the images on the first pass, so typical session with 60 to 100 images is now around 30. Since I prefer to converse with my subjects as I am photographing a lot of this is just what I call “closed eyes and open mouths.” If you have been following my experiment on flickr you may have noticed I like to include one of these bloopers in the set, partly for fun and partly to help the audience to understand the process of photographing a single subject.
Exceeding expectations:
I didn’t expect the response to soft edits that I’ve received, seriously my mom doesn’t even read my blog. So to have a community build up around such a simple idea really excites me. I notice both parties starting to learn and grow together and yet it remains accessible to experts and beginners. Since I started to treat my business with authenticity and transparency I’ve only seen positive results, now I don’t think I could ever go back.
Upcoming Special:
I’ve been toying around with the idea of having an avatar session special and I am very close to having all the details worked out. Stay tuned for more information.
Final thoughts:
I am always looking for ways to improve the experience. Any questions or suggestions for improvement are welcome in the comments below.
Three more ways to show the love:
First up the badge that says “I look at the soft edits on flickr, comment on my favorites, and love it.”
<a href="http://tysoncrosbie.com/blog/projects/soft-edits-opening-the-process-to-the-community/"><img src="http://www.tysoncrosbie.com/badge/participation.gif" border="0" alt="Phoenix Photographer, Tyson Crosbie" /></a>
Second badge says “I love your City 20 art work, I may have even bought a book.” *No purchase necessary*
<a href="http://tysoncrosbie.com"><img src="http://www.tysoncrosbie.com/badge/fanatic.gif" border="0" alt="Phoenix Photographer, Tyson Crosbie" /></a>
Last but certainly not least, in fact maybe the most important badge of all. Says “I am a proud client of tyson crosbie photography.”
<a href="http://tysoncrosbie.com"><img src="http://www.tysoncrosbie.com/badge/client.gif" border="0" alt="Phoenix Photographer, Tyson Crosbie" /></a>
Collect all three!!
Seriously, thank you to all who read my blog, look at my work and support me in this community. I am constantly blown away by the talent and dedication to being good and supporting good that I’ve found here in Phoenix. You all make my dreams come true by allowing me to do what I love.
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?
Three and a half months ago when I started my business in Phoenix, Arizona I think I was the only person in the world that believed how far I could spread my brand and my business as a photographer in such a short time. Of course I started by attending the Chamber meetings and in turn was invited to visit many other traditional networking meetings, which resulted in several coffee meeting pitches being directed my way. Luckily I ignored the sales pitches that would have me paying to get a higher google rank and stealthily avoided paying up to $3000/ year to network with exclusive groups and learn secret business advice. The Chamber has good intentions but I felt like the community aspect was missing most of the time. It was an old boys club mentality, and a heavy push marketing environment.
I intentionally focused locally because it was never my intent to build an empire. I knew from looking at the market in Phoenix I could easily compete at the highest level of photography. So I started to build my bridges not at all by traditional means. First thing I did was start this blog, then began building my network through linkedin and extensively using twitter and facebook to build bridges into the community. I started following the daily rants and raves of the Phoenix twitter community and attending events that were more social in nature and less network business card race inspired.
This is what I was looking for and how the Chamber had failed me, this was a group of people that understood the benefit in having a long conversation even if that person never bought or sold you anything. It became a requirement for me when meeting someone new to converse with them and not just hand them my card and grab theirs. I’d like to continue to differentiate between networking and bridge building because at some point the work I did became a process of resource sharing instead of resource guarding. Networking in most instances becomes an unmanageable list of resources that may buy or sell to you. A bridge for me refers to something local, immediatley useful and built to facilitate two way communication.
PodCampAZ is one of the first great sucesses for my business. I found out about PodCampAZ on twitter and became involved with the planning process by just showing up and offering my services where ever I could as a volunteer. At PodCampAZ I continue to work with some of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met and after a couple weeks found them starting to use me and share me as a resource within their communities. In social media it seems that when you give a little you really do get a lot back.
Results: And I’ve just begun.
- My self published book “Phoenix 20″ is going to be in the hands of the Mayor after my book signing.
- I have a partnership with Mighty Imaging to sell prints from their art store.
- I have about 100 local contacts that follow me on twitter and most of those I would consider friends and some of them are even clients now.
- Almost any event I attend lately someone knows my name before they meet me. (and they’ve already heard good things about my photography)
- I have a community of people who comment and learn about my business by following my recent work on flickr.
- I will have a billboard of my fine arts work on display on the 202 in Chandler in partnership with oibillboards.com by the end of this week.
Social media pays. Even my wife is starting to believe.
Do you have any similar experiences or did you find social media to be a waste of time? Feel free to share with my community in the comments below.
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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