Tag Archives: Instagram

Yes it’s that time again… time to RANT. I have 4 basic topics to cover so let’s get to it.

Rosh Sillars tweeted the link to an article about Instagram this morning written by Andrew Hutchinson for Social Media Today which I thought was good. You should read it. Now while I do NOT disagree completely with the idea that image quality is everything for certain strategies on Instagram, I do disagree with this as an overall statement. So those of you who know me will know that I feel the need to respectfully present the counterpoint in the spirit of healthy debate.

Three reasons image quality isn’t required on instagram:

Think about the name of the app – INSTAgram. The “Insta” in Instagram implies an instant and spontaneous sharing of photos made right from your iPhone. Granted you can post images that aren’t taken with your iPhone but the app is clearly designed with that in mind with the basic camera and editing interface in the app. Many brands post professionally crafted and edited images on Instagram with a ton of attention to detail to the author’s point and it works for them. But sometimes when you capture something fun and immediate you might not have it set up for perfection, and that’s actually what can make an Instagram perfect. I would take it a step further and say that even as a photography studio our strategy on Instagram is typically not to show off our finished work here but to rather bring people behind the scenes and have fun, which leads me to number two…
NOT a professional photo!
Instagram is social. Perfect art might not always be. A collage or a funny incident can tell a story or start a conversation – an interesting one. A perfect photo can too I suppose, but when you go to an exhibition or art museum they don’t hang a white board with a marker under the display for people to engage and leave comments. Tell a story and have fun with your followers and don’t always worry about the quality of the photo. To borrow something that Mark Shaw (one of my favorite Periscopers) might say, it’s not Autogram – don’t just broadcast perfection at people to show top quality. Now don’t post total garbage either, but keep the focus on being fun and social.
There is a ceiling on how awesome your images can be for your following because of the platform. Many people are looking at these images on an iPhone. Is that really the best way to see a professional photo? It’s not a bad way per se, it’s just not the best way. An EZ Bake oven isn’t the best way to bake a top notch cake, but it could be the most fun cake of your life if you do it with a child. Our clients come to our studio to get images to hang as their centerpiece on a wall – not just to look at on their iPhone. So once again – don’t always worry about the quality. You typically can’t show off the very best of a quality photo on an iPhone.

Okay moving on…

Why I Don’t Like Email Lists

This is another one I go against the grain on. I do not like email lists. I’ve never sent out regular email newsletters or tried to build an email list of clients. I’m not saying they don’t work, I’m just not interested in sending emails to clients. Email has been around since well before social media existed, but it’s done on a computer or some other electronic device so it’s not as old school as say, junk mail, so let’s call it “post-old school”. I suspect it works largely as a numbers game – not because getting another email is sooooo awesome.

Will YouTube come back for brands?

I’ve been posting more video to YouTube since I started Periscoping. I like to repurpose some of my scopes and upload some of my tips to our YouTube channel. It has led me to hang out on YouTube with a renewed sense of purpose as a brand, and I’ve connected with people on Periscope who are doing the same. When I went back to the channels and brands I had subscribed to before I saw that many of them hadn’t posted anything in months, but I think this could change… Just my guess – this is one where I’m just wondering aloud. This is a whole other topic in itself on ways to effectively build your brand on YouTube which I’m exploring in new ways now. I’ll keep you posted. What are your thoughts on this? Do you subscribe to channels and organize your YouTube channel with playlists? As an individual? As a brand? Are you social there? Subscribe to our channel and let’s connect!

Yes I’m slightly addicted to Periscope

Of course it comes back to the game-changing monster that is Periscope. I wrote a post for MCP Actions about 5 very specific ways you can use Periscope for your photography studio… and I also wrote a post here about what you need to know about Periscope (so far) back in April. At this point I’m totally hooked – I’ve built some great relationships in ways I never did before on any other platform. I notice however that many people still don’t know what it is yet and haven’t given it a try, so I think I’ll be writing another post soon about what you can accomplish with Periscope. The people who aren’t early adopters might want to know what the “why” is… While I’m at it I may write one about who you should follow there.

That’s it for now – I’d love to hear your comments on this whether you agree or not. Thanks for reading and join me on Periscope where we can discuss these further!

Doug’s Rant – Why Is Social Media “So Quiet”?

January 31, 2015

by Doug Cohen

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Why is social media so quiet lately? It just doesn’t seem to me that there has been a lot going on. Let me explain. For a few solid years there it seemed like it was the “golden age” of major platforms – such as:

Facebook Pages switched over to “likes” from fans in April 2010 a month after we set up the Frameable Faces page.
Instagram launched on October 6th, 2010 and we joined it in May of 2012.
Pinterest launched in April of 2010
Snapchat launched in September of 2011 (more on that in a minute).
Google Plus pages for businesses launched in October of 2011 and they added Google My Business last June.
The major Twitter redesign launched in April 2011.
Vine launched in January of 2013 and at the time we had to wait until June for Android since T-Mobile didn’t have iPhones yet.

Since then……not a whole lot.

All of those platforms seem to still be thriving and growing as a general rule and it has now been two years by my count since a new “major” platform has made a splash.

Is a lull a good thing?

I can’t decide if I like the fact that it’s been a little quiet or not. The thought of feeling like I have to manage additional platforms can be stressful especially if we are only adding more and not dropping any, but the rush of starting out on a new one is exciting and a lot of fun. For example I was pretty excited about Pano Perfect which I thought might be the next big social photo sharing platform but that one has gone nowhere… I hear people talking about Swipe and sure there are others. We can debate all day about what a “major” platform is – I am not using any scientific criteria here… I’m just ranting after all. Feel free to jump in in the comments and add your two cents. What do you think is the next big thing? I want to know.

Meanwhile Snapchat is the one I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Of the big ones I listed it’s the one that we don’t have an official Frameable Faces profile for, and after weighing it I don’t know if it’s right for us as a brand at least for the moment.

Edit* – A Curve Ball**

I wrote that last paragraph earlier today and one of our spokesmodels just happened to pop in to the studio and we were chatting about Snapchat since it was on my mind, and I think I just changed my mind again. She showed me a couple things that convinced me that it could be a good platform for us. For example I didn’t realize how it notifies you how many people have viewed your snapchat stories and which people viewed them. So look for it – my wheels are turning now!

So as it turns out I have Snapchat to work on. I started out wondering why it’s been so quiet in social media, but now that I’ve got another platform to play with I’m hoping things stay quiet for a bit!

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Frameable Faces Photography

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Frameable Faces Photography is a small biz retail mom & pop shop of Doug&Ally Cohen located in the Orchard Mall in West Bloomfield, Michigan, United States Of America!

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Ally & Doug can be reached at the studio at tel:248-790-7317 or emailed at mailto:info@frameablefaces.com

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Being “Frameable” is an attitude, a community, a way of life – a life you would want to celebrate and display on your walls for all to see! Tell us… ARE YOU FRAMEABLE?

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Doug’s Rant – Happy Birthday Instagram!

October 7, 2014

by Doug Cohen

2 Comments

It’s been a while since I “ranted”. We have had a very busy summer photographing seniors and planning and celebrating our son’s bar mitzvah so all I have been really able to think about for blogging is keeping up with sharing our wonderful seniors of the class of 2015. There are plenty of seniors to come as we are just getting started with a whole new round of “fall color” seniors, and we will also be sharing some bar mitzvah photos too. However I saw yesterday that it was Instagram’s 4th birthday and decided I need to comment (maybe not rant) on it and say Happy Birthday Instagram!

Yes – that was our very first Instagram 119 weeks ago of our exterior sign! While many of our early Instagrams were not so stellar as we were trying to figure out where it fit for us, I actually still think that was not bad for the first one.

The Frameable Faces Instagram “philosophy”

We have become big fans of Instagram and we use it in a number of ways. As for the content we typically share, we post pretty much whatever strikes us as fun and valuable to our followers, and we have stayed away from posting videos – we use Vine for short videos. It’s also important to know the etiquette, such as being careful not to over post. As for the types of Instagrams we post, the behind-the-scenes collages of photo shoots for example are our favorites. It allows us to share a snapshot of our time spent with our peeps very quickly.

We started focusing on those because we weren’t sure that Instagram was the best platform to showcase our final images since people mostly look at them on such a small screen. Our work is best displayed as a 24×30 print or canvas on a wall…right? Well it turns out that our images look pretty darn good as wall portraits AND as Instagrams…

But here’s the thing. When we reveal the first sneak peeks here on the blog for a senior session for example, we pick the four we want to showcase and that’s fine – it’s our blog. But most of our seniors aren’t bloggers – they are Tweeters and Instagrammers. So for seniors we prefer to make these images available to them first here on the blog with a sampling, and then later in digital watermarked proofs so they can be the ones to share and show off their Frameable Faces pics – it gives them some control and ownership of it, and then we can join in the fun with comments.

Occasionally we’ll post our real work on Throwback Thursday of a senior alum, but we still refrain from posting current final images… at least for now.

Here is how we break down by the numbers:

119 – Weeks on Instagram

2.34 – Average number of Instagrams per week

278 – Total posts

120 – Behind the scenes Instagrams of senior sessions

24 – Selfies

12 – Pics of our peeps on random visits

4 – Instagrams of Reflecto

14 – Instagrams about our home the Orchard Mall

44 – Behind the scenes of family (and a few commercial) sessions

10 – Throwback Thursday seniors

50 – Various other stuff

So there it is! Happy Birthday to you Instagram! We hope you enjoyed your day as much as we enjoy you!

How To Make Cool Instagram Collages

March 13, 2014

by Doug Cohen

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If you follow us on Instagram you have noticed that we don’t post a lot of final images there. For now we prefer to show what is happening at the studio closer to real time so I usually snap photos of Ally doing her thing with my iPhone. I am not the pro photographer here – Ally is. So while the photos we post on Instagram aren’t of professional quality, that’s not quite the point of Instagram in the first place. That is not to say you can’t post professional and artistic photos on Instagram, it’s just that a professional photo might look better as a fine art piece on a wall. Meanwhile I am going to show you how to make cool Instagram collages so you can have some fun! We had a recent session with the men from Tapper’s Jewelry which is down the hall from us here in the Orchard Mall for their upcoming in-house magazine, Accent. Here is the Instagram collage I made from the photo shoot.

Get Your App

First download an app from your app store. I use the free version of Snap Collage which I find to be pretty user friendly and effective. There is a paid version but so far I haven’t felt like I’ve needed it. For this little tutorial we will be using Snap Collage. Some of the other apps are similar and the steps will be similar as well.

Think Ahead

Keep in mind the type of collage you want to make when taking your photos or at least give yourself some options by taking some vertically and horizontally so that when you’re trying to fit your photos into your collage you’ll have more flexibility. You’ll get better at this as you go. You may even want to clean up your photos with another app before you start – I just started using VSCO and I think it is a great app. Here is an iPhone screenshot showing the sharpening tool within VSCO. The process of taking photos and editing them on a smartphone is a whole other topic that I won’t go into in detail here.

1. Launch the app

You’ve got your photos now let’s go to our Snap Collage home page. You will see the different galleries available there – just click on one and it will bring up thumbnails of the photos there as you can see below:

2. Select the photos you want to use. The nice thing is that Snap Collage automatically slots them into a few different templates which you can choose from along the top of the screen. You can add or remove photos by tapping the thumbnails.

3. Pick the collage template you want to work with. I have picked 4 photos I want to use and Snap Collage has automatically slotted them into several 4 photo templates for me. You can scroll along the top to look at the choices and if there is a template you like but don’t like the way the photos are arranged then just deselect one of the photos and re-add it and the photos will rotate within the template. Tap the one you like to see it in full screen. Note the options at the bottom – we’ll be using the “borders” option shortly.

4. Edit each photo if necessary. Tap on a photo in the template and Snap Collage will bring it to the forefront where you can play with it. Pinch and expand to zoom and/or rotate the photo to reposition it to your liking, and you can see there are a number of tools you can use to make more changes to that photo.

5. Add color, drop shadows, rounded edges, and/or themes to your collage frame. There are several tools in the app to do this. First tap again on the zoomed in photo to get back to the whole collage and then tap on the “borders” button at the bottom. This will bring up the dashboard for editing the frames of the collage.

The ratio choices at the far left determine the aspect ratio of the whole collage – ideally I go for the 1:1 or square ratio which is the Instagram standard. The icons directly under the highlighted word “Frame” indicate which aspects of the frame you are adjusting as you slide the white circles next to each to the left or right. In this case I’ve already adjusted a couple of them including giving my frames some drop shadow to give them a little dimension (this is 5th and last icon at the bottom that I’ve slid almost half way across). The 4th one down allows you to round the edges as such:

As you can see I’ve adjusted it more than 50% to the right and the edges are quite rounded. That’s a little more than I want so let’s slide it back a little:

There that’s a little better. Next let’s click on “Color” and start adding a little color to the frame.

You can now simply slide the vertical scale with all the colors of the rainbow to the right and then within each palate range hone in on the exact color you like in the square. You can see I’ve selected black and grey for the border and inner frame. There are also pre-loaded patterns you can select instead of colors if you click on the “Pattern” button.

6. Share your collage! When you have it just the way you want it you can either save it to your device or open it directly in Instagram right from the app.

As you can see in the last screen shot you can use this app and save these collages for use anywhere – not just Instagram. I’ve used it for posting elsewhere often. This is not the final word on Instagramming or making collages so please share your own techniques! I learn something new every day as I use these tools and play with all the different options. What tips do you have to add?

Doug’s Rant – It’s Selfie Time! – August 30, 2013

August 30, 2013

by Doug Cohen

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Let’s celebrate the selfie and give it its due now that it’s become an official addition to the English language!

Whoa – now THAT’S a serious selfie! Amateur photo taken by Doug with his smartphone. 🙂

Yep, that’s right the selfie has a seat at the table and has been validated as a legitimate word as announced by the Oxford English Dictionary this week. There has been plenty of dialogue and debate about the selfie. Here is the official definition if you ~~have been living in a cave~~ are not sure what we are talking about…

Selfie: “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website” – Oxford University Press

Old School Photographer Lament

Some professional photographers lament the popularity of smartphone pics, instagram, selfies and the like. Some of them worry that these amateur photos are passing for good photos when they’re not, and that this is bringing down the photography profession.

Our Position

We disagree. We enjoy Instagram, snapchat, and even the occasional selfie. We use them ourselves and we feel that the more people enjoy everyday photography the more they will appreciate and enjoy professional photos. Rather than be threatened by it we choose to embrace it and have fun with it. If a selfie doesn’t make you smile you might be a curmudgeon. Lighten up!

Just Be Smart About It

As for the negative side of the selfie, you certainly have to use common sense just like anything you do online. Don’t post pictures of yourself in ways that are inappropriate or that you might regret later and maybe you should consider not completely overdoing it because according to three business schools in Britain too many selfies may actually ruin your relationships!!!

What do you think? Do you post selfies? On Selfie Sundays only or all the time?

Doug’s Rant – To Vine Is Divine, Web Redditing and Digging – July 11, 2013

July 11, 2013

by Doug Cohen

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Vine and Instagram continue to fascinate me and this is the third rant in a row that I’ve focused on it. In the last couple of weeks I’ve actually become a pretty big fan of Vine and I’ve enjoyed discovering some really creative and funny Vines as well as making a few of our own. Here are a few ways we’ve used Vine so far – a little humor, focusing on our community, and a fun hello to our second photographer Angela:

@reflect_o is a thief https://t.co/OHN6LdcZQ1

— Frameable Faces (@FrameableFaces) July 5, 2013

Our six second tour of the @OrchardMall! 🙂 https://t.co/KFpL4iN41w

— Frameable Faces (@FrameableFaces) July 9, 2013

Angela is here! Second Photographer Extraordinaire #LoveHer https://t.co/7vd4Wots8A

— Frameable Faces (@FrameableFaces) June 26, 2013

As for Instagram I must say I barely see any videos there… and I prefer Instagram without videos (apparently I’m not the only one). Being a fan of Vine and not of videos on Instagram is an outcome I did not anticipate, but that’s where I’m at now.

Can you Reddit? Can you Digg it?

I recently read an article on Smart Savvy Social that discussed 10 ways to promote your blog posts and the major takeaway for me was #8 about bookmarking your blog on various social bookmarking sites. I had toyed with Stumble a while back but I had never really spent any time on Reddit, Digg, or Technorati, so I went ahead and registered this blog on Technorati, created a profile on Reddit and checked out the others. I find Reddit to be the most interesting so far because of the community aspect and the points you accumulate for good “karma” in how positive your interactions are. While I am not seeing a whole lot of discussion about the photography business there, I can at least report that so far Reddit is the one that has generated some traffic back to our blog. Collectively they seem to be pretty good resources for web surfing and finding good content.

Quick Hits

Ally is working on a guest blog about using reflectors for lighting purposes on MCP Actions – be on the lookout for that for you aspiring photographers! It may be a little while before it posts but we’ll announce it on facebook and twitter for sure… I also have a couple of articles being published there soon as well.
Here’s a case of “don’t just take my word for it” as the ever reliable Rosh Sillars blogs about the 17 things photographers should not do. I counted and I’ve specifically discussed 8 of them in blog posts and guest blog posts of my own. Admission – we don’t bother with our tripod very often… we probably should a little more. 😉
By the way I’m a big fan of Snapchat as well which you may have noticed is the app interface on my photo at the top of this rant. This is another visual and social mobile app but one that I’m not sure lends itself to use as a brand profile so I use it to have fun with my family and friends just as me. A social media platform I don’t create Frameable Faces content for.

Doug’s Rant – Instagram vs. Vine and Getting Hacked – June 20, 2013

June 21, 2013

by Doug Cohen

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Yep – turns out I’ve got more to say….

Insta……death of Vine on Droid?

I became intrigued from the time Vine was launched as a potentially awesome platform for Frameable Faces. We have used video quite a bit – mainly on YouTube. It’s an effective platform for testimonials, slide shows from sessions, various interviews and behind the scenes features. The idea of Vine is exciting because it provides what I have seen one guru refer to as “snack sized” social media bites to go with videos on our YouTube channel which are more like “main courses”. Vine could be to video what Instagram has been to photos for us – just fun quickie behind the scenes shots – visits from friends, events, photo shoots, and even some silliness now and then. Vine was released only for iOS (iPhone/iPod touch) on January 24th. We are an Apple shop for everything but our smartphones – we have Droids because T-Mobile didn’t get the iPhone until April of this year. As Droid owners (Samsung Galaxy Blaze 4G to be exact) we had to wait from January 24th to June 3rd before Vine was released for Droid. That’s a pretty long wait, and when it was finally released it was a mess……. and it’s still a mess. There is no way to search for other users which totally takes the social aspect away from a social media app. Totally useless. Sure we can be patient and wait – it’s frustrating but what else can we do? We’re not ready to buy iPhones just yet.

Well, yesterday I opened instagram like I do a few times every day and there was a notification there that Instagram has added video! 15 seconds vs. Vine’s 6, with the familiar feature of Instagram layers (specific video layers) and the option to pick a cover image for your video. To me this means Vine’s window for Droid users could shut. Why would I bother trying to build a following on Vine when I can share the same (if not better) content on a platform in the same fashion where I already have a following? I also have to say that while the 6 second limit on Vine forces people to find creative ways to tell a story in 6 seconds, it is just so short. Unless Vine proves to become so overwhelmingly popular with our high school seniors that we can’t ignore it, I think I won’t bother with it. I’m not adding another platform if I don’t need it. Sorry Vine, I could be wrong but I think you blew a huge opportunity by releasing such a buggy mess for Droid and not fixing it before Instagram had their own video option ready. We’ll see how it plays out. Meanwhile here is a blog post with a great breakdown comparison between the two.

UPDATE – I tried to use Instagram video since I finished writing the section above and since T-Mobile doesn’t want to release an update for the Samsung Blaze 4G from Android 4.0.4 to 4.1 or better I can’t make Instagram videos for the time being. Instagram videos can only be made with the 4.1 version or newer. Ugh. The struggle continues…

UPDATE TWO (June 24th) – Vine added search! Now I’m using it and enjoying it. Seeing the updates being pushed to my phone is like watching two heavyweights battle it out – the other morning it was happening in real time! Meanwhile there seems to be a bit of a backlash going on about videos intruding on Instagram feeds… Anything else I have to say on the topic will go into the next rant…

Hacked….

Yes we were hacked. What a nightmare – someone (apparently from Poland) got into our website and uploaded some malware. Google flagged our website and blog with a warning basically preventing anyone from getting to either site with a computer for what ended up being a couple weeks. It’s a good thing we don’t survive by an online ordering business or we could have been in huge trouble. They didn’t change any content on either site or ruin either of them, it was just a pain in the butt having to identify what happened, have our host reset the passwords, check for any bad files, clean the bad files off, and then submit a request to Google to remove the warning. The folks at EPK Design who originally designed this blog for us were hugely helpful in getting this sorted out. That was a bummer and that was why you didn’t see any new posts here for the first half of June.

Other quick hits…

We are excited for our new class of 2014 senior mural in the window of our studio! It’s up and it looks fantastic!
I find Steve McCurry’s photos to be fascinating. If you haven’t checked out his blog before you should bookmark it and you can start with this photo essay on the monsoons on the other side of the world.
This was our first year at Relay For Life West Bloomfield as Team Frameable Faces! It was a great day and there will be a blog post about it here soon…

Social Media Stream of Consciousness Pt. 1 – Facebook and Google+

February 28, 2013

by Doug Cohen

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Okay so this is a little change of pace… Usually when I blog about social media it’s the standard “5 ways to….” or “7 tips for….” or “the 6 best….” – some type of informative lesson with the perfect title designed to explode our SEO to Jupiter and make our blog the envy of every photography studio East (and West) of the Mississippi. Okay well maybe that hasn’t quite happened (yet) but one can dream…..right?

This time it’s a little different…

This is part 1 of what could be a series of streams of consciousness about social media as it relates to Frameable Faces, being a small business owner in general, or whatever else I feel like ranting about. It is a stream of consciousness after all, so who knows what I’ll say right? And just because there’s a part 1 doesn’t mean there will be a part 2 – that could depend on the response, so be sure to comment and share this post or lose this potential opportunity forever (see – when all else fails just scare them into sharing – that should work).

Facebook Fail?

I am a facebook power user. Have been for 5 years. Facebook has changed and I’ve blogged at length about how to navigate the changes. I practice the techniques I’ve preached when it comes to staying the course, but I will admit that I’m not perfect (HA) and yes occasionally I get a little annoyed at how facebook manipulates the user experience to generate money (this usually happens after I post something boring that no one shares). While you’ll normally find me preaching to stop whining about the facebook changes and create better content, I’m just being honest here – I do whine once in a while. Observe:

Text-only posts are getting the most reach right now by a mile for business pages. I had a text-only post on Friday get a 450 reach with no likes or comments. It was a dud and yet it still went out to almost half of our following. The following day I posted a link to a blog post I thought was a good one – no one agreed with me since no one commented and it only reached 93 – only slightly more than one fifth the reach of the text-only post. Then there’s the recent status of ours that contained a link to a blog post which got 25 likes and 9 comments and only reached 306. Oh yeah facebook – that’s really hilarious. Hahaha. Ugh. BUT – the other way of looking at this is that I’m okay with 306 people seeing a great post and a good percentage of them clicking on it and appreciating it. That’s a more successful post than a post that went to 450 that no one cared about. And if my other post that only went to 93 would have been more interesting then more than 93 people would have seen it. Remember to take accountability for your content. So you see how that goes? I have my moment of weakness, but then I right myself and get back on course creating the best content I can. That’s what happens in my head.

That said, I notice as an end user that my “most recent” items in my newsfeed aren’t recent at all. Sometimes the most recent is two days old – I can see how facebook is holding back the content I want to see, so I have to go find the info manually. Annoying.

Facebook Future?

This all makes me wonder about the future of facebook – it’s not as cool of a place as it used to be. Too much garbage, spam, memes, chains, links, etc. I just wish people would post a little bit less of that stuff and more of their own thoughts, and I wish brands would stop littering with salesy posts, crappy ads and specials begging for business. Sigh. Now I’m in no way thinking about jumping off the facebook bandwagon, but I’ve always been careful to make sure our eggs are never only in the facebook basket either….

Looking on the “plus” side of life….

I’ve actually been thinking about revisiting Google+. I’ve always thought it was a ghost town, but a very interesting thing happened on Scott Stratten’s blog recently where he ripped G+ for inflating their numbers based on total Google usage across all of their products and a lot of people ripped him in the comments… he defended himself for a while but eventually he posted an updated retraction when he was proven to have had a slightly incorrect reading of the numbers. Keep in mind that Scott Stratten is one of the baddest dudes in marketing in my opinion (he calls what he does UnMarketing) and whether it was just a technicality that prompted his retraction or if he is really softening his stance on G+, it was the visceral reaction by so many on his blog defending Google coupled with the changes on facebook that is making me look at adding G+ as a regular spot for us. I’ve referenced Scott here not to point out that he was wrong, but to point out that I think he is almost never wrong and this got my attention. The question now is how we might use G+. We mostly use social media platforms for one of two reasons:

1) The “age old” (at least a few years) social media criteria of be where your peeps are

2) We use the platform for a specific purpose – either for a certain kind of content (like Instagram is our behind-the-scenes platform) or maybe it’s a good place to get info (still our favorite use for twitter – not the only use, just our favorite). I don’t like to simply duplicate content and behavior on two different platforms (part of the reason we don’t automate from one platform to another).

So that leads me back to G+ where I suspect that there is some exploration to be done specific to photography – seems that some photogs/bloggers/hangout-ers are getting a lot out of it. It might be a good time to make some connections there if it’s really still growing. Disclaimer here – we actually have a G+ page for Frameable Faces and yes I have been posting links to new blog posts there, violating my own rule of not simply duplicating content. I only do it because it takes two seconds and early on people were saying to post there to help with SEO. Google is the #1 search engine after all. Is it helping? Who knows… But I do know that G+ is not likely to be going anywhere. We just got Google computers for our kids…. Google is a monster. Do you use G+? Personally? For your brand? What do you like about it? I really would like to know.

So there you have it…. a little bit of my mind in words…. fascinating right? Stay tuned…. 🙂

Our 5 Favorite Ways To Instagram!

February 23, 2013

by Doug Cohen

2 Comments

We love Instagram! For those of you still not familiar with this (it’s okay we won’t tell anyone) Instagram is a social media platform that enables its users to take pictures (generally with their smartphone), apply digital filters to them, and share them. As with all of the different social media platforms we use such as facebook, Pinterest, twitter, YouTube (just to name a few), Instagram has its own unique purpose for us. We generally do not use it to post examples of our work, but rather to post what happens behind the scenes at Frameable Faces. If you don’t use Instagram you can still see ours by going here.

Meanwhile we thought it would be fun to post 7 of our favorite Instagrams here representing 5 typical categories. We hope you enjoy them whether you are a Frameable yourself or another photographer/small business owner looking for ways to connect with your peeps.

1. Behind the scenes on a photoshoot

We love these – showcasing the process of creating the images is a lot of fun. It’s instant gratification since I can snap a quick shot of Ally photographing a high school senior for example with my smartphone and upload it right away while we’re still on location. Instagram also has a location map feature which uses the GPS stamp from the photo to create a map of locations where the images were produced. This way people following us can get ideas for where they want to take their photos by seeing where they were taken.

2. Happenings in the Orchard Mall

The Orchard Mall is our home and it is a very cool place with many other independent businesses and good eats. It’s a central meeting place in West Bloomfield and any time there is an event or even just beautiful new decorations we Instagram it.

Events:

Decorations:

3. Fun Shout Outs Just Because

We like to celebrate our community – our brand, and life in general…

4. Visits From the #Frameables

Nothing brightens our day like visits from our #frameables and yes these visits make us want to share! #Frameables is our hashtag on Instagram which works much in the same way hashtags work on twitter. Our peeps ARE our studio and we mean it.

Seniors:

Babies: 5. Stuff That Has To Be Shared Because…Well…It’s Just Too Good Not To

This speaks for itself – you just know when you have to snap a shot and post it.

There are plenty of others – a banana tree at a greenhouse, a practical joke, our snarky reflector Reflecto, road trips, selfies (of course)….. What are some of the things you like to Instagram?

Three reasons image quality isn’t required on instagram:

Why I Don’t Like Email Lists

Will YouTube come back for brands?

Yes I’m slightly addicted to Periscope

Is a lull a good thing?

Edit*** – A Curve Ball

Edit* – A Curve Ball**