As a photographer and marketing coach for creative service professionals I’m always looking for new tools and strategies that can be used to help get the word out about their businesses.

In the age of Internet marketing and social media networking it’s critically important now more than ever for creative service professional to take advantage of every opportunity to get your work in front of and connect with our target audience.

With websites, blogs and social media tools like Facebook and Twitter just to name a few, they are more avenues than ever for pro- photographers to reach potential prospects. So the question becomes “if it’s easier to connect with our prospects online – how do I capture the leads I receive on my blog -or- website?”

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First and foremost I must apologize for my leave of absence, upon my return from this years WPPI photography convention in Las Vegas I was hit with a horrible flu/upper respiratory infection that took me out of commission for the past 3 weeks. I’ve returned and will jump back into keeping the photographershandbook as up to date with new information as humanly possible as I can. Ok so enough with complaining

There has been an interesting phenomenon on Twitter lately and those are posts prefaced with the # sign or what is called in computer lingo the Hash symbol.

Sites like Facebook make it very easy for users to tag their posts for searching tagged words and finding groups of messages on related topics. Twitter was really never meant to grow into what it has become, therefore this feature was never included in the core functionality of the program. This is where 3rd party developers really shine, the fine folks over at hashtag.org have taken it upon themselves to come up with a solution that solves this problem painlessly, let me explain how it works.

Say you want to start a twitter thread or conversation on a particular subject for instance Canon 5D Mark II (sorry my bias here) and want to easily be able to track what others have to say in response to your post. This is where the Hash Tag comes in handy.

Before you begin however there is one step you need to do before starting in with the hash tag and that is follow the twitter account of the folks over at HashTags.org. You can do so by going to www.twitter.com/hashtags and clicking the Follow button, they will automatically follow you back and you are on your way.

So say you want to solicit feedback or recommendations on the new Canon 5D Mark II. Anywhere within your twitter post all you need to do now is include the following #canon5dmarkII, that hash tag now notifies hashtag.org to start tracking any response that includes #canon5dmarkII.

At any time you can jump over to www.hashtags.org and search for your hash tag term, the results will pull up a grouping of all posts that include your term. You can even use their site to search for other keywords of interest to see what people are talking about. Pretty nifty eh!

Tip: Check with HashTags.org before creating a new grouping to make sure that the tag hasn’t been previously used

Hash Tags are a fast and effective way to follow topics of interest. Other ideas include Events, Tradeshows or even Disasters.

Just another quiver in your bag of social media tricks, I hope you find it helpful.

If you’ve heard me talk or read my articles you know one thing that I firmly believe in is Social Media. This new method of marketing your business can help you reach new customers and stay on the pulse of existing ones.

If you’re a photographer who wants to compete in this fast changing and competitive online marketplace now is the time to start getting your feet wet with Social Networks like Facebook, mySpace, Twitter, Flickr etc.

If you don’t understand how social media works I urge you to find a friend, colleague or consultant who can teach you how to leverage the power that Social Media Networking can offer.

There is no better way to obtain real-time feedback about you or your brand than there is through what is called Reputation Monitoring.

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My name is Cris Mitchell and I’m a Twitter-holic.

This is no joke, over the past few weeks I’ve found myself immersed in the inner workings of this quirky little microblogging platform. Those of you unfamiliar with microblogging please read my previous post on the subject.

If you are like me and have spent any amount of time using Twitter, you’ll quickly realize that things could be a lot easier. With that said I’m going to list my Top Ten Tools for day-to-day Twittering.

1. TwitThis – www.twitthis.com – TwitThis is an easy way for people to send Twitter messages about your blog post or website. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the webpage and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL. Then visitors can send this shortened URL and a description of the web page to all of their friends on Twitter.
2. WP to Twitter - www.joedolson.com/articles/wp-to-twitter/ - The WP-to-Twitter plugin posts a Twitter status update from your blog using the Cli.gs URL shortening service to provide a link back to your post from Twitter.
3. TweetDeck – www.tweetdeck.com – TweetDeck is an Adobe Air desktop application. It aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces.
4. SocialToo – www.socialtoo.com – SocialToo is working to complement your social experience by providing you with all the tools you need to get the most you can from those you follow on the web. We’re automating the processes needed to make this experience as easy as possible, and providing you with tools to reach your audience to its fullest potential.
5. TwitScoop – www.twitscoop.com - Great search tool for finding other photographers or people in your niche market.
6. TweetBeep – www.tweetbeep.com – Enables anyone to receive alerts by email whenever a specific word or phrase is tweeted on Twitter, similar to Google Alerts.
7. TwitterBar- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4664 - TwitterBar allows you to post to Twitter from Firefox’s address bar. A small unobtrusive grey icon sits to the right of your address bar; clicking on it will post your tweet, and you can hover your mouse over it to see how many characters you have left.
8. Twitterrific and Twittelator Pro- http://iconfactory.com/software/twitterrific – http://www.stone.com/Twittelator/ – Both are iPhone applications that allow you to send and track tweets from your cell phone, useful for posting messages when I’m away from my computer (I told you I’m hopeless)
9. TwitPic - www.twitpic.com – TwitPic lets you share photos on Twitter, TwitPic is also included in both Twitterific and Twittelator Pro.
   
10. TweeTree - www.tweetree.com – Tweetree is a usual site for view @reply threads on Twitter. It does so by grouping conversations together so you can follow the conversation in a logical order.

There you have it, those are my 10, can’t live without tools for twittering. I know there a bunch more out there so if you don’t see something in the list that you think I should know about, make sure to post them in the comments section, I want to know.

I’ll be the first to admit that I had no idea how time consuming it was going to be to maintain a blog and as you can see so far it shows My last post was well over a month ago.

Between my normal day to day design business, running ProPhotoResource.com and working the upcoming Internet Marketing book, how the heck am I suppose to find time to keep a blog up to date. It’s practically a full time job keeping up with the pace at which technology is changing, we’ve gone from HTML to Web 2.0 in the blink of an eye and from blogging to micro blogging in a matter of months. One could spend their entire life just keeping up with their social networks.

I’m often confronted by photographers interested in starting a blog or who have tried starting a blog only to end up frustrated and overwhelmed by the whole experience. What started with great intentions, ended up in total failure, because they quickly got overwhelmed by the thought of having to continually feed the 700 pound gorilla that has become their blog.

If you find yourself in a similar situation, here are a few tips to hopefully get you over the hump.

1. Start Slow and Grow - Know your limitations, if you can only carve out enough time for one post per week, start with that and work up from there. Trying to do more than you have time for is only going to end up in failure.

2. Set a Day and Stick With It - Like anything in life if you can make a routine out of it, the better luck your going to have with it. Pick a day and say “Ok Monday is my Blogging Day”, put it on the calendar and stick with it.

3. Don’t become a Social Media Butterfly – Yes social networks are a powerful tool for increasing traffic to your blog, but at the same time can zap every second of spare time you have, time that could be better spent working on your blog. Pick a few of the most popular Networks such as MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and work those. If you find yourself with more time on your hands, then you can dabble in some of the lesser known social media outlets

4. Lighten up and Have Fun – Whether you are blogging just to share information or you are a serious blogger, making a living from it, remember why you started blogging in the first place and Just Have Fun!

Well let’s see if i can follow my own advice. I’ll make a point of keeping this blog a little more active if you promise to keep coming back

Until Next time.
Cris . . .