Hello Everyone!
Welcome to August, and our monthly newsletter! It's summer's last gasp - some schools go back to class as early as August 15th - so try to stay cool as you grab that last long weekend or trip to the beach!
We are already starting to plan our fall photography sessions, and we hope to see many of you on the road this semester. While talking to various clients about admissions shoots, we have noticed a new direction for image requests, and are making it the theme for this month's newsletter.
As many of you know, Phillip has been shooting on campus for nearly twenty years, and in the past few seasons we have seen an explosion in the need for imagery for non-traditional usage. Once upon a time we shot pictures for viewbooks, admissions fair graphics, and direct mail campaigns. Then people started to mention this crazy interwebs thing, and website imagery was added to our bag of tricks. Today the sky seems to be the limit! With the enormous influence of social media and direct message, our clients are looking for images that will catch a potential student's notice in even more places.
In our last few "semesters" we have watched the rise and fall of Myspace.com, and its successor, Facebook.com. For both of these social media outlets there are excellent onboard photo-linking programs, but did you know you can also link your Flickr.com or Snapfish.com accounts to it as well? This is great if you have a special event to cover and want to post multiple photos in a stream for viewing.
Then there is the new kid on the block, Twitter. We first began experimenting with Twitter about a year ago, but it's only in the last six months that we've seen the number of users jump to a point where it is really useful. Its short, telegram style messages are great for broadcasting events, campus days, and school news, and their url-compression software automatically makes long web addresses short enough to fit the famous 140-word limit. Heather Mansfield, of DIOSA Communications, put it succinctly on the CASE listserve this summer: "I think as soon as teens and twenty-somethings realize how perfect twitter is for mobile, they will jump on Twitter in droves." Twitter, like Facebook and Myspace, has several applications that allow readers to click on a link and view photos. Twitpic is the most popular, but there is also Yfrog.com, and the brilliant Flick.to.Twit, which allows you to post a photo to Flickr.com and automatically announces it to your Twitter readers. (We are seriously convinced that that app may not be coding, but is actually Harry Potter-style magic.)
So many uses for your "admissions" photos! We fully expect this to be the year that we are asked to provide content that is designed strictly to be sent to cell phones. We can't wait to see what comes next, and we look forward to providing imagery for all of it.
Enjoy your final weeks of summer! We will see you in the fall.
Don't forget to visit us on the web: www.phillipspears.com
If you received this as a forward, please drop us a line and we will add you to our mailing list: traceybrower@comcast.net
And don't forget to keep an eye out for Higher Education Marketing Report, which will have an article by Phillip on admissions photography (hopefully the September issue): www.hmrpublicationsgroup.com/Higher_Ed_Marketing_Report/index.html
Catch up with you soon,
Tracey
