If you’ve been reading my blog, you know that Photography by Depuhl was one of the 100,000 businesses that Google selected to be a ‘favorite place on Google‘. I got a nice sticker from Google that includes a QR code, which links to my website.

Well I just saw a cool way of using this bar code on a site I’ve just discovered. Rosh Sillar’s new media photographer website. He has his QR tag on the front page of his blog, so I figured I should also include mine on my blog – for an easy link back to my site.

QR Code

Social media exploded onto the web in earnest in 2009, with facebook having more hits than Google on Christmas, twitter becoming an interesting method of communicating with each other. What is in store for 2010? I believe Social networking is going to go B2B. With products such as Chatter from Salesforce and Wave from Google being tried out right now, collaboration between clients, partners, suppliers, … will look different then before.

If you already use wave, you will be able to see a wave that is inserted into this blog. If you are not take a look at the following introduction from Google and see if this looks interesting to you.

Now more than ever being a professional photographer is more than capturing an image. Technology has changed the way we capture photographs from a photochemical process (film) to a electronic (digital) one. This shift in technology has also caused a shift in responsibility. A commercial photographer has to do much more than just take a picture. He has to become an IT specialist (or hire one) to do everything that today’s clients expect.

We are able to manage our business online, which begins with building our website, how we deliver our images to our customers, the way we manage our clients and business contacts, how we track the performance of our web presence and ads online and where we actually host our website.

Before you read on I do have to make one disclaimer, this post is inspired by Jeana Lee Tahnk’s mashable post “5 Essential Sites for Professional Photographers” and were her blog gives you the turn key solutions to some of these needs, the sites that I have listed here, require you to do a little more work – be it learning a new software, re- interpreting how a cloud can be used for your business or figuring out how to bounce data through a few services to make it work for you. The upside of this is that you do save money. Here are the sites in no particular order: (more…)

I am going toward a convergence of design in my website, blog and social media platforms like twitter. I have been working hard on branding my business in the real world over the last two years and now it is time to translate that into my online presence as well (thanks to Bob from Bob Buchanan Design for helping tweak the website version).

www.depuhl.com

blog.depuhl.com

www.twitter.com/photosbydepuhl

Photography by Depuhl is cautiously testing the waters of paid advertising. The first ad began running on December 16th, 2009. Although I have been creating photographs for clients since the late 1980’s, the way of selling yourself as a photographer has drastically changed. You used to have to purchase expensive ads in printed annual professional directories to have your work seen, have an agent that had all the connections – a route that I just could not afford as a beginning photographer. Today I can determine down to the $0.01 how much an ad costs, which search phrase triggers it, when and where it is displayed, …

Screen capture of the first paid ad for photography services

Paid advertising is the logical next step for our online presence. Back in 2007 I made the decision to put a professional website up online. It is created with an awesome photoshop plugin called sitegrinder. This is my first step in a concerted effort to use the web as my primary sales tool for my fashion and product photography.

In 2008 Photography by Depuhl pursues its online network in earnest … (more…)

On December 8th, 2009 Google rolled out a program called “Favorite Place on Google“. The search company has send out the decals free of charge to over 100,000 businesses in the U.S. and I am pleased to announce that Photography by Depuhl has been selected by Google to be one of these selected businesses. According to D’ Technology Weblog, Google picked the businesses, that’ve been most sought out and researched on Google.com and Google Maps

We're a favorite place on Google

Photography by Depuhl has been found in their business listings over 6500 times in the July-September, as per Google’s letter that was included with the Favorite window decal. All of these results have been organic results with no PPC advertising done for the company. Incidentally this has been the best quarter my commercial photography business has ever had, in spite of the economy.

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Just added catching the light blog to:

Blogging Fusion Blog Directory

photoblogs

Wow! I just saw something incredible that’s coming soon!

We all use social media to keep in touch with our clients, contacts, suppliers, … at least we try to. The question is always how to integrate Twitter, my facebook page, LinkedIn, … with our webpage and our business, our billing and our contact management system. But if you’re like me, we have a handful of applications, websites, clouds, … and try to piece this all together, automating as much as we can to get them to talk to each other. My blog has my twitter and facebook feed; my facebook feed shows my tweets, the website captures lead information into my CRM and my contact database syncs on my computer, my phone and the internet.

But there are still many components that I need to look up and log into. My cloud based CRM does a nice job of keeping all my marketing and sales information together in one place, my social networking presence is webbed together loosley; but that’s just me – just Photography by Depuhl, my commercial photography company.

What if all of that information was in one place?
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That question was posed to me by an old friend of mine, who is currently the Global VP of Corporate Affairs and Communication for a big company. Well, I thought that’s easy – my website is supposed to get me work.

But how do you do that? Actually how does it do that? Say your a visitor to a photographer’s website and you like his photos and you have work that fits his style and ability, what do you do then? Hunt for an email on the website? Fill out a contact form and wait for him to get back to you? When a person submits that form, or sends that email – you are the closest to the time that Google calls: M.O.R. – the Moment of Relevance.

This is the time, when your company is on their mind.
This is the time, when your service is something they need.
This is the time, when you have the best chance to make your presentation.

It is not a post card, that gets lost in the mail.
It is not an email, that gets caught in a spam filter.
It is not a mailer, that gets forgotten when the next guys mailer shows up.

It’s here, it’s now, it’s you.

So HOW do we leverage this moment?

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