Author: barce

Social Media Marketing Is Not Photography

A photographer produces photographs. These can be sold, and if you sell one, you are a professional photographer. Photography is a trade. A photographer uses sales and marketing skills (now often in the form of social media) to sell photographs. What Instagram makes you forget is that photographs are used by brands to sell.

Many Instagrammers are the unwitting branders, marketers and sellers for companies that make millions, and they all do this for free.

Instagram is a private enterprise. If you have photographs that are at odds with their TOS, they can – with totalitarian silence – remove you from the “community.”

If you feel someone in the IG “community” was very nice to you and then backstabbed you, and they do photographs related to brands, it is because how paid social marketers are in Instagram is the same way actors are in Hollywood. They have a nice side they show to the world, but they are ruthless in order to get the fame and wealth they want.

What is the optimal strategy then? Personally, I do not think people who do Instagram or photography for a living are really happy, or are artistically satisfied. As a professional social media marketer on Instagram, your client wants photos of rather ordinary stuff, *and* puts you in conditions with crappy lighting, *and* wants those Instagrams *NOW*. The optimal strategy is finding something that supplements your *real* photography which has standards outside of likes and follows.

I was inspired to write this piece based on what Ken Rockwell wrote as well as Jenn Herman whose latest blog post shows that there are 3 types of Instagram accounts: brand, business and personal. The key to being happy is knowing which kind of account you are running. You cannot be all 3 without running into conflict, e.g. you can’t have a personal account be fully authentic without sometimes coming into conflict with your account as a brand. The brand will always demand a message for marketing.

If you are not running a personal account, and you are in America, Instagramming as a social media marketer means presenting happy, fantasy images with sublime landscapes of a mostly middle-class and young America that does not exist, so that capital can move. (Most young people are poor here and have been since the Great Recession.)

Photography has always depended on spaces like Instagram. It has also always depended on public spaces, too, like museums. But more and more photography is being oppressed by capital and law enforcement. Lots of young photographers think street photography is illegal, which it’s not in the United States. Many police officers treat photographers as criminals. The thing to ask is, “Who is your photography serving? God? A state police? A free peoples?”

Milling About Court in Instagram

Following people on Instagram is very similar to what you would find at the Tudor court or in at a networking event in Silicon Valley.

The people in corners do not need to mill about. They have the power, and like the king or queen, their focus is limited to a few.

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The people not at the corners nor seated are milling about. They are working for some sort of gain by working the room. This can be seen when people follow lots of other people.

Ultimately this means that photography, the art, has become conflated with the machinations of courtly ambition.

This offends democratic sensibilities on so many levels. Being a queen’s favorite should not make you a better artist than someone else but this sort of perversion of aesthetic judgment is built into Instagram.

No suggested users have followed me back

Yesterday I decided to try to follow all the suggested users by liking really good photos and leaving genuine and sincere comments. At least one of them would follow back, right?

Zero followed back. I am ok with this because I already have an audience I love. But if you are a new user what are the chances of getting a follow back?

As it turns out Instagram wrongly detects a genuine interaction as comment spam. If a suggested user is following 100 or so people or less & you try to leave a comment you get this:

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I eventually stopped following suggested user accounts because the ones left had photos with just text in them. I was really boggled by one of the suggested users that was just selfies with text.

My Instagram Process versus My Photographic Process

“Instagram is not photography… It is not a photograph unless you print it (on paper).” I first heard this idea from André Herman. This sort of photographic traditionalism or conservatism employs a subtle metaphysic. How could this be true? It is true in the sense that before photography not every portrait was considered a painting. A certain intent and symbolism is required to transform a portrait into a painting.

Yet there is more than just a classical metaphysical distinction between a portrait and a painting, and a mobile snap and a photograph, respectively. Social media and consciousness of an audience is always in the background. A mobile snap cannot be divorced from branding, marketing and technology as well as the quotidian Zeitgeist of the Internet.

A photograph will lack the enumerated background of a mobile snap but invites the pantheon of traditional critique and avant garde institutions.

When I create a photograph, given that I learned photography in the 1990s, I am always comparing it to the masters. My photographs are always already – to use the Heideggerian phrase – not good enough.

When I Instagram, big data analytics comes into play. I can always do better through social media optimizations. It doesn’t have to be art.

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Betty 1998 by Gerhard Richter

Cheap Advertising on Instagram

Last year I hosted over 25 photo walks organized through Instagram and about half of these were branded “experiences.” I did this to learn more about photography, marketing and working with brands. It was a fun experience but not so fun realizing I helped generate millions in revenue and just got an Instagram mug from it. 😀

I was able to reach a large audience for a fraction of the cost of a TV commercial (< 50%) , and was able to produce measurable and actionable results. stolioriginal

Here’s some data from the Stolichnaya photo walk which had the hashtag #stolioriginal :
https://gist.github.com/barce/f541cc4612ec9b11da1f

followers 234564
likes       9328
posts         67
guests        32


1240 (drinks & food)
1200 hotel + flight for organizer

$2440 for 234,564 viewers
$0.010


Commercial for a show like Two and a Half Men
$215,000 per 30 second commercial
8.5 million viewers
$0.025 per viewer

In one evening Stoli was able to reach over 200,000 eyeballs at a cost of a penny per eyeball! Great stuff, right?

What cannot be expressed in a Tweet

What are the limits of expressing thoughts in Twitter?

Here’s a powerful but inefficient (when run) thought that can be expressed on Twitter, a quick sort in Erlang in 126 characters.

qsort([]) -> [];
qsort([Pivot|T]) ->
   qsort([X || X <- T, X < Pivot])
   ++ [Pivot] ++
   qsort([X || X <- T, X >= Pivot]).

Also strcmp implemented in C can be tweeted:

int bstrcmp(char *s1,char *s2) { while(*s1 == *s2++) {if(*s1++ == 0){return 0;} } 
return (*(unsigned char *)s1 - *(unsigned char*)--s2);}

A lot of Perl one-liners can fit into a tweet – powerful and useful ones.

You can also propose the concept of a hash tag in a tweet:

hashtag proposal

However, there are many thoughts that seem to be difficult to fit into a tweet:

The Pythagorean Theorem and one of its many proofs
Anselm’s Ontological Proof for God’s Existence
Merge Sort in Ruby
Merge Sort in PHP
Why you should or shouldn’t outsource
What qualities make a great tech hire
The logical fallacy in another person’s tweet
How to subtly tell someone something in an indirect way with the only others knowing being those in the know

Twitter encourages the laconic expression of thought.

Instagram Updates Explore Page Algorithm

If you haven’t noticed yet, since you haven’t gone to the Explore page in *years*, Instagram has updated its Explore page algorithm. This page has featured only photos with the most likes. This led to poor quality photos by brands and celebrities always being on the Explore page. Thanks to some algorithmic curation, it seems that you get a curated Explore page that shows photos very similar to the ones you’ve liked in the past.

This has 2 impacts.

New Explore Page

1) People will start clicking on the explore page again.
2) Users that otherwise would never get any attention, now do.

surfacing content you want

Great job Instagram!

The Death of Friendship

We live in a world of irony. Our information society with its plethora of social networks has enabled us to say anything to anyone. Open-ness should foster more friendship, yet technology dilutes the word ‘friend,’ as someone merely linked to on a social network. There are less demands placed on friendship, yet technology raises the bar on friendship, a friend is someone that will communicate with you on any social medium.

Friendship, the pre-Internet sort, is dead. What sort of friendship is this? Friendship has always been a piece of perplexity and complexity when considered philosophically, but let me create a context.

Paul Miller describes pre-Internet friendships when he gave up the Internet for a year.

1. You meet your friends off-line often through serendipity.

‘Outside the stadium, I was spotted by a man brandishing one of my own articles about leaving the internet. He was ecstatic to meet me. I had chosen to avoid the internet for many of the same reasons his religion expressed caution about the modern world.

“It’s reprogramming our relationships, our emotions, and our sensitivity,” said one of the rabbis at the rally. It destroys our patience. It turns kids into “click vegetables.”

My new friend outside the stadium encouraged me to make the most of my year, to “stop and smell the flowers.”‘

2. Conversation requires complete and full attention, whose reward and complete and full connection.

My sister, who has dealt with the frustration of trying to talk to me while I’m half listening, half computing for her entire life, loves the way I talk to her now. She says I’m less detached emotionally, more concerned with her well-being — less of a jerk, basically.

3. There is an art of simply “hanging out.”

I used to hang out at a coffee shop called the Reverie after 9/11 and before this current tech boom. Unemployment made friendship important and also gave people plenty of time. There was an art to hanging out. People would just sit for hours talking about art, music, and life. We would enjoy a pause, a smile. Life felt like a Terrence Malick film in its pacing and its profound revelations that could not be summed up in a photo, a tweet or a blog post. I am hard pressed to find a coffee shop like that.

Paul Miller backtracks a bit. He didn’t experience an “apocalypse of self.” He didn’t find his real self. In the end he denies that there is an Internet self and a self without it because of a conference he went to.

But then I spoke with Nathan Jurgenson, a ‘net theorist who helped organize the conference. He pointed out that there’s a lot of “reality” in the virtual, and a lot of “virtual” in our reality. When we use a phone or a computer we’re still flesh-and-blood humans, occupying time and space. When we’re frolicking through a field somewhere, our gadgets stowed far away, the internet still impacts our thinking: “Will I tweet about this when I get back?”

My plan was to leave the internet and therefore find the “real” Paul and get in touch with the “real” world, but the real Paul and the real world are already inextricably linked to the internet. Not to say that my life wasn’t different without the internet, just that it wasn’t real life.

I would easily de-bunk this reality by citing the numerous studies on how our brains react chemically to the virtual and the real. In a General Theory of Love, there’s a study referenced where physical presence is a necessary party of the healing power of therapy. Babies cannot be raised virtually because they rely on physical contact to mirror the mother’s breathe and heart rate. Sudden Infant Death syndrome can be an outcome. If babies can die from a lack of physical touch, then how can it not have an effect on adults? We need other people in meat space.

Still, Paul Miller is right in that many have the Internet in the back of their minds when they disconnect. Unplugging and its attendant behaviors are a kind of play acting, an anachronism.

In the pre-Internet world, they said that you were lucky if you had one friend. In this Internet age, you are lucky if you do not make the mistake of treating a virtual connection as a real friend.

Instagram is Cheap and Creepy

I was the community manager for IGersSF for a year, which is part of a larger network of Instagramers started by Phil Gonzalez. The Instagramers Network, which is a name that Instagram doesn’t want them to have, is one of the few ways that mobile photographers traveling around the world can connect to users.

Full disclosure: I own Facebook stock and really want to see them do well, but as an owner of said stock, I’m surprised at how stingy Facebook is to both shareholders and its community.

While running IGersSF I had a great time organizing photo walks so that mobile photographers visiting San Francisco could see how friendly and welcoming the city was. During my tenure I organized and hosted 25 photo walks and 1 fund raiser. I even hosted an open bar. Since my resignation there’s been about 1 photo walk per month.

Given that there are at least 50 people in the employ of Instagram in Mountain View, I’m a bit shocked at the low level of community involvement. As a former developer of a mobile photo upload app, Via.Me, I know Instagram can run on auto-pilot with 3 people. What do these 50 people do all day besides make selections for the Weekend Hashtag Project?

If I had the resources of Instagram, I would be doing the following:

1. Host a photo walk every week in as many cities as I could
2. Provide a decent amount of food and drink after
3. Start an artist sponsorship program of around $1000 where users can apply for sponsorships to get their art projects funded.

I’ve tried to engage Instagram’s community managers on providing these things for the community, but they would never get back to me. I turned to brands to provide this sort of modicum of fun and libations for the community, but soon found out that Instagram wanted these brands for themselves.

Instagram simply isn’t into doing what’s best for the community because they really (and as a stockholder I know this) are focused on getting a return from partnerships with brands.

This would be okay, if Instagram wasn’t active in dissuading folks from creating communities. Brands are okay, but creating something like Instagramers SF is something in their eyes that must be destroyed. I always tried to get some sort of guidance from Instagram HQ, and they only gave me guidance and suggested using their new DM technology for a photo walk once. Also, have you noticed how all the companies with Instagram in them had to change their names? This is so creepy if you ask me.

I am left wondering why I’ve done so much for the community and those at Instagram HQ have done so little. Instagram, why are you so cheap?