Nick Allen - @nickwallen

The other day I came across Pixellus - a Norwegian company focused on digitization, editing and restoration of customers’ unique and irreplaceable collections of images. They take your old format, films, slides, photos and negatives then digitise them to keep and share in today’s digital world.

Pixellus may sound like every other online start-up out today, but there’s three reasons that they are seeing good growth in revenue. One of those being their Expert Staff.

Passion drove the founder
Christian Wig (@christianwig) the company’s founder has built the firm that combines his passions.

An avid photographer, Christian spotted a need for those more established photographers, who have great shots in old format film.

He has an IT background meaning that developing data storage, payment methods, delivery systems and scaling the process would come easy. His youngest son, was also in need of a job, and loved working with photos.

His passions have combined.

Experts are at its core
While Christian’s son has an interest and ability in photo editing, what really makes him in expert for the job is his Autism. With high functioning Autism, this job really brings out the attributes that were making it so hard for him to find a job.

Like the other staff with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism - his personal traits help Pixellus perform as it does.

Top of his skills/attributes list are:

• Dedicated
• Accurate
• Focused on details
• Structured and systematic
• Very logical – either/or
• Loyal
• Honest
• Often likes repetitive and predictable work – with well defined and clearly documented tasks

Where normal employees would find it hard to work on the same defined tasks, by nature autistic spectrum workers focus in on the minute details. They pick out imperfections easily and are most comfortable with a routine to their day.

Loyal and honest, they are also very frank in their communications. Direct and to the point they are honest about the work they have produced, any issues they have and if they’ve made an error. And because they’re focused and methodical there are FAR less errors and the quality is a lot higher.

As the number diagnosed with Autism or Asperger syndrome grows every day, Christian sees Pixellus employing more who have an interest in photography.

Developing an online training course Christian takes those with initial skills and brings new recruits up to speed on the specific skills required for the job. The training also means his employee base is as scalable as his infrastructure.

The team of Experts all sign confidentiality agreements which combined with their nature to ‘not blab about work’, means confidential or personal image collections are in safe hands. Their track record here has already landed them contracts with local organisations and the photographer communities.

They also take pains to mention privacy in their PR and media efforts. When the workers were interviewed by local TV, their own personal images were used to illustrate on screen and client materials were stored securely as usual - by experts.

Easy to use their services
With competition already established, Christian realised that like all successful online services Pixellus had to be easy to use. The minute it is difficult – companies and customers will shy away from adopting the service.

Flexible pick up and delivery hours, an online review of digitised photos, and easy payment methods streamline the process for customers. The online training program also means induction is an easy process for new recruits. A system that’s easy for all users continues at Pixellus’ core.

Their Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/Pixellus shows how willing and satisfied customers are spreading the word to their contacts.

Week 2 by stephenmeszaros, on Flickr

I was recently asked what a photographer starting out in social media should do so here's my starter tips.

Networks
I’m going to presume that everyone has an account on the four big networks:

Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn

Your profiles should point to your main website and you have a great shot of yourself, with your face in view, together with a biography of you that reflects your specialty areas you work in - Its the same on each social network.

You share regularly updates to each of the top 4 - Your latest blog post, portfolio additions and assignments.

Flickr
You should be on Flickr, and depending on your stance, may wish to offer some photos under creative commons license there – as an opportunity for your work to be featured in other sites – driving traffic and eyes to your Flickr account. Where they will find your website listed.

On Twitter
You should follow other photographers of note – a few popular ones I follow are @chasejarvis @pixelator @envatophoto @cindyvriend (I re-share / re-tweet links to their articles if I think they would help others).

Follow the #photography hastag - save it as a search on twitter or use Hootsuite to follow the stream. Choose specific tags relevant to your niche.

If you have an iPhone – consider using Instagram and posting to your twitter account – to add some variety there.

Follow others elswhere too
You should also explore bloggers in your niche - subscribe to their RSS feeds using Google reader or friend / circle them.

Check your feeds regularly – maybe for 10 minutes in the morning – share any articles you found relevant on twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus.

Tailor your message to each as they have different audiences.

This might be other photographers – but if your subject matter is motorsport for example – follow motorsport sites and blogs – potential clients. If you do school photography – align yourself with schools and those already providing services to schools. Malls for Santa stalls.

Engage and interact as you would in a normal meeting. Thank retweets and comments, share information and try not to be too salesman like.

Your website
This should be about three things, getting people to contact you for shoots, and showing them that you are capable of giving them great shots – then selling your photos.

I’m not sure how sophisticated a system needs to be for online payment but there are plenty of tools like Paypal that can collect your payments.

Ideally no flash – as that’s not supported well on mobiles. 

A good call to action should be present at top – call me / contact me

Content
Present large images of your recent shoots (where you have permission to release). Index them into categories that are relevant to your audience. – Corporate / baby / action / still life

A good way to do this may be by posting them as blog updates. That way you have a new set of images you can share as a group on social media.

I found this website today and thought they did this very well www.jasongroupp.com/blog.

You should work to create blog articles with at least a little text in as well. So that the site is optimised for Search engines.

Rand Fishkin wrote a more advanced note on blogging SEO that I found a good read.

Story telling around the process of the shoot will often already include many of the terms people might search for when looking for a photographer. It will also build the potential clients trust in your service. 

Photographers have I missed anything glaringly obvious? 

Sorry – a Tuesday rant so please discontinue reading at will.

Does anyone else suffer from endless cold calls? I get at least two a day and the latest two technique are real doozeys. Thankfully I have a reception that check and voicemail most.

But those that do get through are really bad.

Really feels like they are making schoolboy errors.

Calling Home... by 85mm.ch

Some samples

“Hi – its mumble from mumble. I’m calling regarding your ad on mumble dot co dot uk if you could give me a call back on 0207….”

This leaves me vaguely worried that someone in my team has put their “tech guy” on to me to place a banner ad. So I call back to find out it’s a potential slot on the most irrelevant site possible.

“Hi – Its Mumble, just following up on our email chain from December.. can you call me on 0203…”

A chain involves two linked items rather than one piece of unsolicited email BTW.

The next type - approach me about services that at a 30 second glance you would know we don’t need. I’ll say this online again for reference

• I've got a good CMS that we're working on now
• Towers Watson went through a large rebrand during the merger of Towers Perrin and Watson Wyatt 

Google me

The most frequent calls are for rebranding and CMS systems. 

Those are a little obscure and would take a bit to figure out but how about knowing:

• I work at a B2B company so don’t need DM consumer emailing lists or B2C services. 
• I work in Digital Marketing, Social Media and Content Strategy so don’t need  
  • a yellow pages listing 
  • paper stocks
  • reprinting
  • physical storage
  • to change my phone company
  • event locations
  • or bus services for that matter.

I work in Digital Marketing so I will ask my networks first if I need an expert. That said - if its innovative and your approach is right...

Rant over I’m off to check my phone messages and print some reports to fax home. Please add your favourites – I’d love to get a chain started.

Feeling slightly techie today as Sunday evening was spent creating some Yahoo Pipes that are now in action.

I have a team of colleagues who have their own twitter accounts. They have a central account that they would like to tweet their tips from as well. But they needed a neater solution than logging in and out of the main account, worrying that they are posting foursquare check-ins etc that are irrelevant to those following the main account.

Feeding in all their content would not add value to the main account as a source of great tweets.

So the idea of a #TIP came up. If they tweet with that hashtag – it automatically posts to the central account.

Pipes lets you combine a number of RSS or API feeds – manipulate – and output as RSS or JSON.

Combining a series here I’ve managed to aggregate a teams Twitter feeds, and filter to those with the hashtag #TIP - ready to be fed to the main account of the team.

All About Anchor Text by @randfish ow.ly/8uFZ7 great #SEO #tip

— Nick Allen (@NickWAllen) January 16, 2012

 

The steps are:

1. Fetch (RSS feeds) 
2. Regex (alter regular expressions of the feed – change item.title replacing “username:” with “RT username” ) 
3. Union (after repeating 1 and 2 for all members - combine them)  
4. Create RSS (simply merges the lot to an RSS feed) 
5. Filter (searches the RSS feed for instances where the tweet contains #TIP) 
6. Pipe output (finishes the item) 

From there this RSS feed is posted to the main account using ifttt.com. 

I'm going to explore some more this week, as I'm sure there's other good Pipes waiting to be created:

• Combine Blog, Twitter and Facebook feeds to create a news stream on a site. 
• RSS feed of top #Architecture tweets
• Combine Flickr accounts for backup to Dropbox
• Search your brand and email updates 
• Filter Youtube / blog for specific tags 

I've got a question today - When you think of web content, where do you draw the line between trade secrets vs. knowledge that could entice clients to buy from you?

Many B2B and B2C marketers (People to People in any relationship remember!) struggle with deciding "What can we say without our competitors gaining an advantage". The focus is on their competitors rather than their clients as people. 

The bar is being raised in terms of what clients expect to understand about your services, company and product before they will buy from you. 

The real question I think is what blunt nosed hard hitting tank of a post can I get out that others can't mimic or compete with. Then how do I keep that freight train of great content rolling.

The line varies by market maturity and your position in the market. Let's talk about consultants or freelancers. I'm going to take a mid level early years (or early months in tech) market in this case.

Here's some first steps I'd recommend.

Give them an idea of the detail you go to by providing some truly insightful first steps and research they can use. Here's some examples:

• How do you approach X
• What's your first steps with clients
• Answer the ten questions your clients most ask when you first engage them
• Consider timely posts related to the seasonality of your industry (annual reviews, audits, salaries, price updates)
• Give your take on recent breaking news in the industry

Next take the above and segment it by your experience. If you offer a number of services, double the posts in areas that you're tying to break into. Tweak the posts destined for areas where you're an expert and move them to areas you need to grow.

If you're an expert in one segment or industry, tell them about it by showing a case study or research you've done. You may even want to consider a special rate for clients that agree to help tell the story of their experience with you.  

In segments where your company is trying to grow, push the boundaries and give away your weakest trade secrets. If you've got the capacity and systems to leverage those secrets quickly, even if your competitors are awake enough to follow your blog/site/tweets, your competitive advantage will endure!

Being the first with an idea, if you have enough followers, and fans will overpower those who are hesitant.

"Oh yeah, we do X too" is never as powerful as being the first out there saying and doing something well. 

Here's some more content types and ideas to keep you going on content.

One of my favorite sites Design You Trust has implemented a nice little feature to encourage sharing and engagement on their site.  But I not sure how I feel about it “ethically”. I share their content anyway, but will I do that more now that I’ve seen this (I used to just follow them on RSS).

It’s powered by PunchTab and here’s their elevator pitch  

Overview
PunchTab is the world’s first instant loyalty platform that allows website owners (including bloggers), application developers and brands to create a social and mobile-enabled loyalty program for free in minutes. We have two popular products today, both of which cost nothing to use:
1.     - An ongoing loyalty program that you can use to encourage your users to visit every day, share your content on social networks and leave comments (we also have a development kit that allows you to add custom ways to earn points). Users will earn points every day for their actions and can redeem for rewards from a customizable loyalty catalogue when they earn enough points.
 2.    - A one-time promotional giveaway widget that encourages your users to spread the word about your site in exchange for entries into a prize raffle.
 

Incentivised Content Sharing – What’s your take on it?

“I’m a Manager. I don’t have time for Social Media”

I too struggle some days as well to schedule tweets, check my streams and update my status.

But in a large corporation, surely it’s a numbers game? If you can have all your associates, telling all their contacts and colleagues what the latest is from your company - why wouldn’t you do it?

Establish guidelines for your organisation as to what is appropriate to share in Social Media. Reiterate their employee code of conduct, data privacy and information security obligations. Remind associates of legal implications if you are in a regulated industry (FSA etc).

With that complete here are two phases all associates/employees in any company (big or small) should be aiming to complete in 2012 .

Phase 1

Social Media 101

• Do I have a LinkedIn account with a completed profile, appropriate corporate image and added my contacts.
  • Am I updating my status with mentions of the recent material released on our public website that is relevant to my LinkedIn audience.
  • If I am running/presenting/attending an open registration event – have I updated my status to reflect this.
• Do I have a Twitter account with completed bio and link to Towerswatson.com or my LinkedIn account. 
  • Am I updating my status with mentions of the recent material released on our public website that is relevant to my Twitter audience.
  • If I am running/presenting/attending an open registration event – have I updated my status to reflect this.
  • Pre, during and post an event – have I updated my status mentioning the event’s #hashtag and relevant “publically available” pre reads and relevant quotes.

Phase 2

Once comfortable with your accounts try these 201 tips.

Get personal
When appropriate, respond to questions on Twitter, LinkedIn and well, anywhere on the internet.

Be consistent
In both your messaging tone and frequency of posts.

Get technical
Connect your accounts using www.ifttt.com so that “New tweet by you with hashtag X” is posted to your LinkedIn account as a status update (or to other Twitter accounts you manage). Doing this – rather than piping all your updates to LinkedIn retains value for your colleagues, and eliminates the noise, if you are tweeting about events or multiple articles.

For those who are comfortable with their Facebook account being for business. Post there initially, as Facebook API posts are algorithmically downgraded in the highlighted stories stream. Then share with Linkedin and Twitter.

If you have created a lot of material in one day – schedule your Tweets and LinkedIn status updates using www.bufferapp.com,www.ifttt.com or www.hootsuite.com.

I came across a fun campaign today run by Natura (Brazilian beauty and cosmetics company).

To launch their new line of hair products 'Plant', Natura partnered with the site Ingresso.com, an online cinema reservation site. At the time of purchasing the ticket, users were prompted as to if they were taking a female with them. they could then record a tribute to her on their webcams. The tribute was shown before their chosen movie began.

It's a relativey integrated campaign - shared on Twitter and their Facebook page to prolong the interaction. Although, and this may be because it ran in October, there's no link on their site to it.

An app was also created on their FB page so that others could post their own dedications and a mosaic displays those that have given and received dedications from the site - a wonderful spot for long distance Christmas wishes.

Here's a clip of the results. It's in Portuguese but you can get the idea pretty quick that their partners a chuffed to receive the dedication. The young girl says "Grandma your hair is as beautiful and white as snow".

If you're in brazil, make your own dedication at: www.facebook.com/naturaplant

So are you looking for your daily dose of inspiration?

Jarno @jarnosmeets80 is building wings so that he can fly. He's also doing a cracking job of documenting it across three platforms Twitter, Facebook and Youtube and in his blog.

I've not asked Jarno if he's up to it, but I think this is a fantastic chance for someone or some brand to give Jarno some help and support his story. A real chance to Market the unfinished product.

Here's some insights into Jarno's Work in Progress - a recent video update.

Apart from the technical aspects of the build what intrigues me about Jarno's story is learning about what motivates him - his grandad's sketches.

As a child I was always very intrigued by these drawings, back then I really believed that my granddad would once be able to fly on this bike. Later on I realised that this would never be possible, it was his naive, childish fantasy. The images of his flying bike always have been floating around in the back of my mind.

For this reason my grandpa is still my biggest inspiration for starting this ‘Human Birdwings’ project. My dream about flying started because of his sketches. So I’m really happy my mother found these.

Perhaps there's a brand that could get behind this build? Surely the storytelling capacity here is infinite! At the least follow Jarno's blog here: http://www.humanbirdwings.net

As an aside:

Jarno asked if I had any social media tips - which was hard as he really has three main social networks covered quite well.

Here are three I can think of to start (plus reading some of my older posts :-) maintaining communities and Twitter 101

• Start targeting and following the editors of publications you'd like to feature you (Popular Mechanics) and take the time to RT, like and comment on their articles.  
• Search twitter for enthusiast and follow
  
  • Try listorious.com for groupings of these
• Maybe consider posting to Vimeo.com any high quality footage you have - their community is more aligned with artistic / hand crafted projects. 

Here's a neat infographic from Socialcast detailing some US stats around who's online, doing what, over the holidays.

I'm reminded to once again re-evaluate that work-life balance as I know I am a culprit: checking my Blackberry during the evening, On Twitter / Facebook / Google+ while watching evening TV, checking-in on Foursquare at the park...

I did however find time to read up on some great articles, get half way through The Swiss Family Robinson, and write a post for iStrategy on the impressive Han Han (slightly jealous as his day job lets him blog well)

Next to work on an architecture post that I owe the great MooArc guys in Guernsey and stop my Klout from plummeting as I have a reasonable offline life...

But back to the point - it looks like Internal Social Media and collaboration tools are creating just as much engagement and interest with employees as their external counterparts.

#E2sday: Mobile Lurking Through the Holidays