As I mentioned last week, the conversation is about:

Everyone is a photographer: a camera in every cellphone, a point-and-shoot in every pocket, a digital SLR camera in every bag or home. New platforms to create, distribute and sell to a wider range of clientele give everyone the opportunity to be a *professional* photographer and sell their photography.

We’ll cover the economics behind the tools to create, promote, distribute and sell photography-related content in today’s marketplace while also covering some the ethical issues created by a flood of new professional photographers. Look for us at SXSW on Sunday, March 14th at 5 PM in room 8A at the Austin Convention Center. Direct link to the event on the SXSW schedule is HERE.

Looking forward to the conversation here and at SXSW!

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Fred Wilson often publishes the slides of his talks to the web before the events to solicit feedback and input from the many great minds on the web; I did it for a presentation as part of a panel at PDN Photo Plus Expo last October and loved the process, and I wanted to do it again for a talk I’m giving at Photoshelter’s Austin Photo Seminar “Thriving in Uncertain Photographic Times” in Austin on March 13th.

Looking forward to your feedback, inputs and ideas about how I can improve; please leave your feedback in the comments bellow or email me.

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SXSW last year was a fishbowl, an immersive experience that has continued to influence my life today: I met a ton of great people, created some great relationships (some of which led me to move to New Orleans), led a Core Conversation about trends in venture capital and entrepreneurship, and thoroughly enjoyed both Interactive and Music (a little too much, since I crawled home with the SXSW scurvy).

As great as last year was, this year will be better. I’ve talked to a lot of people coming to SXSW this year and the overwhelming opinion I’ve gotten is that it’s going to be busier, busier, busier. I haven’t dug into the full schedule of events to really figure out what I’ll be doing, but there are a couple things I know I’ll be doing:

• Pre-SXSW: The Chevy SXSW Road Trip Charlotte/Raleigh Team NC will be hitting New Orleans on Tuesday March 9th. The Chevy SXSW Road Trip Challenge is a competition between eight teams from across the United States…

  Starting the week of March 8 (the week before SXSW), eight teams of social media folks from across the United States will embark on a combination road trip/scavenger hunt competition from their hometowns to Austin behind the wheel of some of Chevy’s newest products. Along the way they’ll need to complete 50 “challenges” in order to determine the winner. The winning team will be the one that not only has completed the most challenges, but has done the most interacting with their community on Twitter and their own sites. But what’s really going to be fun is that you get to help us decide all of the tasks the teams are going to have to complete along the way!

  Team NC is Jason Keath, Nicole D’Alonzo, Wayne Sutton and Ryan Boyles. I don’t know what challenges they’ll be completing in New Orleans, but I do know that NOLAlicious and Capdeville will be hosting a tweetup to welcome Team NC to New Orleans, Tuesday March 9th from 5 to 7 PM. RSVP on the Facebook event page. And, of course, follow Team NC’s blog.

• Pre-SXSW: The Tuttle 2 Texas crew is coming through New Orleans March 9th to the 11th on their way from London to Austin for SXSW. I first heard about Tuttle from Alan Patrick at SXSW 2009, and meeting with the Tuttle crew every Friday morning quickly became a weekly ritual for me whenever I was in London in the later half of 2009.

  As Lloyd Davis explains, the Tuttle 2 Texas trip is about:

  The real purpose of the trip is to make connections and build relationships through conversation. That’s what Tuttle is really good at. That’s why we’re travelling slowly across America in such a crazy, old-fashioned, inefficient way. I want to meet old friends with whom I’ve only ever tweeted. I also want to meet new people and get to know them and think about who we are and what we have in common and how we’re all trying to make sense of this world that has been turned upside-down in our lifetimes.

  They’re taking trains from Boston to NYC to Washington DC to Atlanta to New Orleans to experience a bit of slow travel, filming a documentary about conversations, examining the similarities/differences between American and British culture, and then they’re riding with me to Austin, tweeting, videoing and blogging the entire way. Follow their trip on their blog, Tuttle 2 Texas. And if you’re in NOLA, we’re going to set up a space for conversations at Launch Pad and a tweetup for them on the 10th. Stay tuned.

• Saturday, March 13th, 11 AM: Photoshelter’s Austin Photo Seminar: Thriving in Uncertain Photographic Times. I’ll be giving the introductory remarks about “Creating Context for your Content”, extending a thought about Instead of focusing on the image, focus on everything around the image. In short:
  

  The biggest creative and business opportunities for photographers is not the image, but everything around the image. In other words, the opportunity is in context, not content. Taylor Davidson will set the stage for the day by discussing how photographers can build and leverage rich “context experiences” to create artistic and business opportunities in the photography industry.

  My goal is to set the stage for the rest of the day:

  You have a rock solid portfolio, a fancy website, and you’re tweeting nonstop. Now what?

  Join the photo marketing experts from PhotoShelter and local pro shooters as we get together for an afternoon to discuss, debate and share insight into the changing landscape of our industry. You’ll leave armed with the new tools, innovative marketing strategies and inspiring techniques you need to grow your photography business now. Don’t just survive, thrive.

  This event is from 11 AM to 4 PM at the Long Center for the Performing Arts, and since it’s not a SXSW event, requires separate registration and a $20 fee. Register HERE.

• SXSW: Sunday, March 14th, 5 PM: SXSW Core Conversation. I’ll be co-leading a Core Conversation entitled Everyone can be a *professional* photographer with Allen Murabayashi, the CEO and co-founder of Photoshelter. In short:
  

  Everyone is a photographer: a camera in every cellphone, a point-and-shoot in every pocket, a digital SLR camera in every bag or home. New platforms to create, distribute and sell to a wider range of clientele give everyone the opportunity to be a *professional* photographer and sell their photography.

  We’ll cover the economics behind the tools to create, promote, distribute and sell photography-related content in today’s marketplace while also bringing out the conversation from the rest of the attendees. Sunday, March 14th at 5 PM in room 8A at the Austin Convention Center. Direct link to the event on the SXSW schedule is HERE.

• SXSW Interactive: Good times throughout. I’ll have the chance to continue to talk about my love for New Orleans and the opportunities in the emerging startup movement in New Orleans, all while bouncing around meeting people.

  I’m looking forward to the Se@SW – Southeast at SXSW mixer, New Orleans’ panel Uprising Tide – Inciting Online Communities into Offline Movements, checking out panels about social search, Haiti CrisisCamp, and many other events that I haven’t yet heard of but are sure to rock my SXSW.

  Serendipity, please do me right again, last year was great.

• SXSW Music. Oh, and I’m staying in Austin for SXSW for Music. Got a band I need to see? Drop me a line. Looking forward…

Want to know where I’ll be throughout the rest of 2010, or to contact me about speaking, consulting or meeting? Check out my 2010 schedule.

Go to this page to hire me. Email me at tdavidson@taylordavidson.com if you have any questions.

Free Advice to Start

Start with this range of free advice about shifting business models in photography, marketing, website development and social media:

• Taylor Davidson, 34 Posts on Evolving Business Models in the Photography Industry. Start with the Five Lessons series for the best introduction to the conversation.
• Taylor Davidson, How to use Twitter to market your photography, a presentation from a panel about Twitter and Photography at PDN PhotoPlus Expo in NYC in October 2009.
• Photoshelter, Google Analytics for Photographers – Free Download, a free guide to understand how to use Google’s tools to monitor website traffic and make informed business decisions.
• Photoshelter, SEO for Photography Websites: Free Toolkit, a free guide to understanding website design and search engine optimization.
• Photoshelter, Social Media for Photographers, a free guide on how to grow your photo business with social media.

Consulting to Leap Forward

While the free guides are full of great information, they also require some time for you to understand and use. If you want to up your learning curve and work with me to develop strategies and tactics specifically for your business, I provide consulting services for:

• Online Marketing and Social Media: Review your current online marketing strategy and social media plan (including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, YouTube, etc.) and develop integrated online and offline marketing plans tied to your business and product goals. Review your website content and website analytics to create online and social media marketing strategies.
• Business and product strategy: Review your current business strategies, review your ideas for growth and create new strategies and tactics.

How does it work?

• Price: New Client: $49 for first 30 minutes, $125 per hour afterward. Existing Client: $125 per hour.
• Process: Go to this page to schedule and pay for a consulting session. Once payment has been received and a day and time has been selected, I’ll confirm by email. Our consulting session will through a conversation over the phone, and after the session I’ll email you a document summarizing our conversation, the links we discussed and we’ll determine next steps.

Speaking

I’m also available to speak at select conferences about the photography industry, social media and marketing. Over the last year I’ve spoken at SXSW 2009, PDN PhotoPlus Expo 2009, TribeCon 2009 and IgniteNOLA, and I’ll be speaking at SXSW 2010, Photoshelter’s Austin Photo Seminar, CEPIC New Media Conference and more events through the rest of 2010. Click here to check out my schedule for 2010.

Connecting

I love connecting with the range of great people on the web; I’m easy to reach via Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and, of course, good ‘ol email at tdavidson@taylordavidson.com. If you aren’t interested in my one-on-one consulting, you’ll still be interested in following the thoughts and analysis on my blog. Follow the blog by RSS or by email.

The evolution of a thought is a funny thing. I’ve long obsessed over the idea of context, inspired and shaped by Umair Haque’s line of thinking about user generated context, markets, networks and communities and many of his other principles.

Later, I picked up the idea of culturematics from Grant McCracken, a concept I’ve applied in thinking about communities, the power of “doing cool (meaningful) stuff”", and creating relevant, shareable events and experiences as participatory “marketing” campaigns.

About “doing cool (meaningful) stuff”:

“Cool stuff” grows only if it resonates, if it’s meaningful, if people care. “Cool stuff” are the small-scale, human examples of the power of focusing on creating rather than capturing, of focusing on product instead of marketing. Demonstrations of the power of living a life too cool to ignore.

“Doing cool (meaningful) stuff” is powerful because it’s the foundation behind turning relevant, shareable events and experiences into participatory “marketing” campaigns:

I believe there is a huge opportunity for people to follow their passion and evil plans to create relatable experiences and culturematics as “marketing campaigns.” Because these experiences are inherently human, they can invade niches and propagate through communities cheaper, better and faster than traditional marketing efforts.

… What are the keys? Passion, meaningfully directed. Transparency. Authority. A unique point of view. An ability to connect discrete actions to a meaningful cause. Resonance with a community. An obvious, transparent business model that “fits” the product, service, experience and community.

In my recent post, “Instead of focusing on the image, focus on everything around the image”, I applied the continuation of these thoughts to the photography industry.

But it’s a concept that applies to all forms of marketing.

Creating rich, immersive and scalable experiences is the biggest opportunity in marketing today, and “experience artists” are going to play a large, rich role in marketing going forward.

Why? To repeat (and add to) my recent post,

• Content is far easier to copy than context.
• Content is cheap to create and distribute, but context is (still) expensive.
• Content creation is an evolutionary process. The evolution builds valuable, immersive, rich context for leaders and shapers to create and guide the markets, networks and communities behind the evolution.

  How? The path taken to create content impacts the final product, but the path to create context is *part of the final product*. Remember, paths are more valuable than destinations.

• The economics of the web have increased the competition between content creators, flattened the experience advantage and upended supply and demand for content. But at the same time, it’s expanded the opportunity to create context, made context easier, cheaper and more accessible to create than ever before. People that recognize how context is created, what type of context they can create, and why context is important will create economically meaningful, valuable and sustainable products, services and experiences. And more than anything, that’s what we need.
• Marketers and business strategists today are fond of giving the advice “join the conversation.” While I agree, it’s only a step towards the larger goal: “join (and create) the experiences”. First: join, listen, learn and understand the best practices, cores and edges in your markets, communities and networks, because it’s step one towards building the knowledge and confidence to take the next step: “join (and create) create the experiences”.
• Experiences are more powerful than conversations in creating the rich, immersive context, social objects and shareable, participatory media necessary for marketing campaigns. David Cushman and Jamie Burke asked “Can you buy space in conversations?” in their recent presentation about The Death of Advertising; to extend the thought, my question is “can you buy space in experiences?” Conversations, no; but experiences, yes.

Lest one think of this as idle thought, the examples are being created by bleeding edge practitioners today.

If you’d like to discuss examples and see how you can apply these concepts to your business, drop me a line at tdavidson@taylordavidson.com or @tdavidson; hire me to consult and I’ll help you devise strategies and execute campaigns applying these principles.

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In October 2008, as part of my 5 Lessons series about how photographers can create new business models, I wrote about the opportunity to connect with context and content:

It’s always been about creating great content, but there’s now a larger opportunity than ever to deliver great context.

Artists have always understood the need for context; why do we create series? Why do we create artist statements to explain the themes and ideas we explore? Why do we obsess over the stories as much as the images? Why do we return to view certain images over and over? Why do we love the images we love?

We create series, themes, ideas and comprehensive bodies of work because we understand that they are more powerful than individual images. The true beauty is in the discussion, the linkages between images, the connection between the images and the stories, their connections to causes, communities, meaning and people.

We’ve always known this. Content is important, but context is critical.

Instead of just being an artist, be an “experience artist”.

Creating rich, immersive and scalable experiences is the biggest opportunity in marketing today, and “experience artists” are going to play a large, rich role in marketing going forward.

What’s different today; the economics of content and context have changed and shifted the balance of power and opportunity from creators of content to creators of context.

Thus, the biggest creative and business opportunities for photographers is not the image, but everything around the image.

Why?

• Content is far easier to copy than context.
• Content is cheap to create and distribute, but context is (still) expensive.
• The path taken to create content impacts the final product, but the path to create context is *part of the final product*. Remember, paths are more valuable than destinations.
• The economics of the web have increased the competition between content creators, flattened the experience advantage and upended supply and demand for content. But at the same time, it’s expanded the opportunity to create context, made context easier, cheaper and more accessible to create than ever before. People that recognize how context is created, what type of context they can create, and why context is important will create economically meaningful, valuable and sustainable products, services and experiences. And more than anything, that’s what we need.

How does this work for photographers?

• Instead of selling the image, sell experience, meaning, connections: sell context.
• Embed narrative into the content.
• Be a hub and lead a community.
• Create content moments and shareable experiences that take advantage of the technological and economic opportunities of the web (online and social).
• Create culturematics and do “meaningful stuff” that resonates and flourishes because it’s simply too great not to.

Examples include Jeremy Cowart’s Help-Portrait, Chase Jarvis’s live events, Dear New Orleans, and Flak Photo and liveBooks’s crowd-sourced conversation about the future of photobooks.

But that’s just the start, the tip of the iceberg as smart content creators shift to leveraging the power of context.

That’s what I do; instead of focusing on just the image, I work with everything around the image. Want to work with me?

—

For a lot more about the subject, start with 34 posts about evolving business models in the photography industry.

Originally mentioned as part of my How to use Twitter to market your photography presentation, a thought that I’ve continued to hold in my mind:

What you say, do and share = who you are = who you find = who you attract = who listens = who wants to share, help and buy.

The thought is a key component of how to think about marketing products, services, companies and events by creating culturematics and doing “cool and meaningful stuff”.

What I do.
With that thought in mind, I recently re-wrote my “About Me” page to explain what a Business Designer and Experience Artist does and to align who I say I am with who I am, with the simple goal of letting the universe know what I’m doing, what I want to do, and to hang a “I’d love to work with you if you’re awesome” sign up. And obviously, email me if you’d like to work with me.

—

Photo reblogged from NOLAlicious.

Responding to a train of thought around potential funding models for startups, returning to an old post about venture capital:

Venture capital, for one, has yet to deliver a scalable, viable funding and economic model to fit this new model of economic organization. The traditional high-risk, high-reward, high-touch operational and cultural model simply does not fit the micro-business economy, an economy of “lifestyle” businesses based on smaller interactions and smaller bits of value exchange, created out of the need to build lives, not necessarily a business to sell.

… How can venture capital adjust?

Sramana Mitra’s response, Blogosphere on Bootstrapping: Taylor Davidson:

Well Taylor, Venture Capital cannot adjust. It’s a fundamentally different model, and only bootstrapping works in this mode. But I am sure you have already reached that conclusion yourself. Potentially, though, corporations can fund strategic plays that encourage entrepreneurs to build businesses leveraging their platforms. Examples: eBay and Amazon could micro-finance online retailers; Google could micro-finance content ventures; SunPower could micro-finance solar installers; Salesforce.com could micro-finance SaaS plays on the Force.com platform. You get the idea …

Actually, I haven’t reached that conclusion. Traditional venture capital is ripe for creative destruction and reconstruction. All industries go through cycles of creative destruction and resurrection in response to industry and market conditions: why would venture capital be any different?

In fact, we’re seeing innovation: consider Founder Collective, First Round Capital’s Entrepreneur’s Exchange fund, RightSide Capital Management, or the variety of emerging venture funding models, all examples of bright minds attacking problems in venture capital as opportunities.

If we consider “venture capital” as the function practiced by the majority of venture capital firms currently in the marketplace, then perhaps we would reach the conclusion that the venture capital industry is fundamentally different and cannot adjust.

But if we consider how and why the larger “venture system” invests risk capital into unproven businesses, then it’s easy to see that venture capital, like all industries, has changed and adapted over the years, and will continue to do so.

My comment in response to Alan Patrick, Rob, Rob me do!

The best thing about stuff like Please Rob Me? It creates the reasons and incentives for developers to create location-based-services with greater granularity and control, and perhaps provides incentives for users to actually pay for LBS, as long as users can see the upside of using LBS services.

Think of it like credit fraud protection: we all know credit cards can be hacked and stolen, our identities stolen or faked, but we use these services because of the upside they bring us every day.

When users can see, measure and value the upside impact, then we’ll see some truly robust location-based-services. This is part of the development cycle.

Location-based services, stuff like Foursquare, the downside and upside of public personal data, and the nature of technological and cultural privacy? It’s early days, people.

—

Alan, btw, has written *extensively* about privacy and location-based services (and many, many other topics) from many, many angles over the years on his Broadstuff blog, a voice of reason guaranteed to cut through the BS. If you’re interested in an older post with a great comment conversation between Ethan, Alan and I, check out The emerging risks of privacy abuse in location based services.

Highlighting a comment by Michael Lewkowitz on Closing tabs, opening minds:

Meaning is what get’s us up in the morning. Passion is what makes us jump out of bed.

Stories are very effective ways to express meaning and passionate stories are the ones that are most compelling. Stories are rich in feeling, emotion, nuance, and literal ambiguity, allowing people to interpret, relate, and even engage/change/adopt. They are a medium for spreading it.

I do think products/services are media as well… in fact every interaction ultimately is. The difference between meaning and passion comes out in the difference between dell and apple products.

Where I think business, or maybe better institution/organization fail in this area, is their stifling of passion in favour of control – in having ‘customer service’ operators following scripts to deliver consistent message vs being enabled with information and tools to improve the customer’s experience because the company is passionate about their experience, not manipulating lowest call-centre cost and maximum upsell. Meaning gets people show up for work. Passion infuses/infects them to make the company great.

A thought: does meaning = direction, passion = fuel?