How to Make Money from your Photos AND How to get more interest from Google to your blogs

I have joined a photo site called PicFair which is a stock image site which is a bit different to others. I have done a number of paid photography gigs which is great AND a long time ago. I had one good sale to Getty’s when some boats ran aground in Auckland after a storm, like this one which I took outside Fergus McCormack’s Kayak and Skate Hire in Mission Bay. But mostly the money goes to the famous photographers or get used for free, often via social media.

Anyway, I’ve been meaning to complete the metadata on hundreds of photos that I have taken over the years, but never got around to it and never really saw the reason why I should. This morning in the shower I was listening to the Home Business podcast which featured Elaine Rau AKA LadyBlogger, who had some great information about SEO.

So the key to it was how important the metadata is that you have on your photos because Google doesn’t just look at the content and keywords in your blog, it also looks at your links and the data behind your photos.

So I love sharing my photos (and I’d love to make some pocket money from the images if I can so I can perhaps put it towards a new camera, although these days you can of course take amazing pictures from your mobile (and PicFair is happy to take those too). A disclaimer here, the link I have shared is an affiliate link. That doesn’t mean you would make a cent less if you use it, but if you do use it and sell photos, I can benefit too and of course you can do the same if you sign up.

Anyway I just wanted to share that info and from now on I will include metadata in my photos before I publish them in a blog or on a photo site. In the coming week, I have recorded the video below showing not only how to do that, but also how to work out what keywords to actually use using a fantastic new tool I discovered last week called Ubersuggest. I demonstrate how I used it in this video.

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Presenting to IT Professionals with Sead IT People

A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of presenting to a group of ICT professionals at the Mercure Hotel hosted by Sead I.T. People. The presentation in the series of Sead Latest in IT Seminar was on Mobile Marketing.

How did we get here

Sead Presentation

Covering topics including the latest Gartner Hype Cycle predictions, Location and Proximity Based Marketing, Check-In Marketing, Mobile Computing, QR Codes, Business Intelligence using maps and the hot topic of the use of personal devices in a corporate market, there was something in it for everyone. Case studies illustrated not only practical use of technology, but professional processes to ensure that projects were well designed for success.

The presentation outlined the ongoing chasm between people in the ICT profession and their colleagues when it came to understanding and use of new technologies, particularly mobile and location based. I encouraged the audience ranging from consultants to CIO’s to consider how they can educate and encourage their companies to understand the new technologies and how they fit into their business frameworks. There are great opportunities for IT people to be welcomed back into the boardroom by working closely with the management team to show them how to implement and benefit from new technologies, safely and securely.

Luigi and the Sead Team at the Mercure

Blame the Technology and Australia

Continuing my search into what happened at Whitcoulls and Borders and  generally what’s going on with New Zealand retailers I am finding no surprises, which is a real worry. Two words come up a lot. Technology and Australia. I know a little of both. I live for technology and have trained many retailers over the years (including some who were already millionaires) and while the technology has changed, the principles haven’t. More on this to come.

Australia and New Zealand

As to Australia. In the 90’s many Australasian retailers who had New Zealand operated subsidiary chains based in New Zealand, decided to do away with local country management, local buyers etc.  and to save lots of money by treating their NZ shops as Australian branches. I guess they considered New Zealand as a slightly bigger Tasmania. Not huge, but worth having, especially if they didn’t put much effort into senior staffing  resources.

When performance decreased they blamed the economy, they said that NZ was just an over inflated state and it was always going to be that way, which was how they justified reducing local resources in the first place. The fact is while we may have a lot in common, we are not the same. We are made up of different cultures and history and have subtle differences in our lifestyles. Subtle enough that you can’t treat NZ stores the same as Australian stores and expect the same result.

Similar scenarios happened in many cases with the decades of American Globalisation. It’s funny really that America wanted to change Japan and the rest of Asia Pacific while Japan wanted to change the west. I well remember having discussions with senior management of Casio in Tokyo and Hamura about improving the software on their cash registers. One of the issues was that they hadn’t allowed for people pressing buttons in the wrong sequence. Have you ever been in a retail store when the ECR (Cash Register) is bleeping loud noises no matter what buttons are pushed and the stress it caused the cashier? Their initial response was “They must use the ECR in the right way or you should find better customers”. We ended up beta testing their software in NZ and Australia first and then getting Japan to tweak their software. That was one of the initiatives that helped us get 70% market share in the ECR market in NZ and helped Casio increase theirs around the world. But then of course the company I worked for was sold and I along with my boss and several other great people were made redundant despite the fact that we were doing really well, but because they thought we were earning too much. I’d love to know what their market share is in NZ now. I know it isn’t 70%. Anyway I’m going off on a tangent.

The big thing I noticed in the NZ stores was inventory management. They were carrying a lot of books that I wouldn’t think anyone would buy other than as a joke. I went back to Borders a week ago to jot some of the names down, but it looks like they went in the $1, $2, $5 sale and were gone. They had many dated books especially computing which must have been in store for several years, technical books on how to use software that almost no one has used in the last 5 years.

From what I’ve been told, someone automated the purchasing software to replace books that had sold, so for example if a particular book sold really well, say 5,000 copies, the system would replace with another 5,000 copies. Well there goes the profit from the first lot.

One of the things that makes New Zealand different is our ethnic communities. All over New Zealand, but particularly in Auckland we have clusters of ethnic communities; Chinese, Korean, South African, Indian, Pacific Islanders and more. Brands who fail to take that into consideration waste massive levels of stock by having the wrong product in the wrong locations, which then becomes shop soiled and potentially unsaleable.

Inventory needs to be managed locally by category managers who understand and are at the leading edge of their category and who understand their local market. They need to know weekly what is going on and understand who their customers are and what they are buying. Some books date more quickly than others and need to be moved on quickly, others will hold their value longer, but will still have a rapid half life.

In my previous blog about Whitcoulls and Borders I wrote about how they could follow the example of Amazon and know what their individual repeat customers were buying and therefore their interests and could recommend books to them. Amazon continue to prove that people in NZ will buy based on recommendations along the lines of “You bought these 3 books, other people who bought the same books also enjoyed the following titles”. Not only do we often buy them, but we also pay massive freight costs to get them here, at the same time as local book retailers are discounting stock that people aren’t buying. How smart is that?

One good way of dealing with this is using Business Analytics or Business Intelligence tools such as BIonaMAP, soon to be launched by New Zealand geospatial solution provider, GeoSmart. Fortunately for retail chains, this product will support both Australia and New Zealand, so users can have visibility over both countries.

BIonaMAP

Whitcoulls and Borders

I was thrilled to learn that the remaining Whitcoulls and Borders have been sold to Anne and David Norman. Now they have some hope. They will now live in the Pascoes Group and of course this group are known as having revived the ailing Farmers chain and given them new life.

Once the essential housekeeping details are sorted, such as property leases and staff contracts, there is every reason to hope that they will breathe new life into Borders and Whitcoulls.

That can not mean BAU or Business As Usual, because even though they did OK and the biggest problems were in Australia with REDGroup. Nevertheless these stores were not run optimally and they were not run with the times.

I heard people, partly lead by local publishers, saying that if the NZ stores were run from Australia, they would probably signal the demise of the NZ author. Certainly I agree that we would have seen less Kiwi authors in store, but I think ultimately either the publishers would have to become less greedy and insular or the local authors would start to embrace the new eBook media and of course in doing so they can either self publish or join Amazon or other local eBook publishers. Neither are ideal for people who love books.

As I’ve said in many previous blogs about Whitcoulls and Borders, a few of them can be found here, the first thing is to go back to basics. For these stores to be successful they need to operate smarter and provide what the modern shopper wants. There are many good examples overseas.

With the chain expanding, here a some ideas that I would look at.

• 

  Macy's

  Gift Registry. Chains like Macy’s in the USA have had phenomenal success with their national gift registry programs for decades. They have kiosks in store which are linked nationally. I was so excited the first time I went through one I almost bought a gift for a young man’s Bar Mitsva in Chicago. I was in New York at the time looking for a hat in one of the coldest winters I have ever experienced. It was so well laid out, there were thousands of special events from weddings to anniversaries and being national, you could see from New York, what a person in Madison Wisconsin had their hopes on. Given that the chain owns Farmers and a number of jewellery stores, this would be a great opportunity to combine the lot.

• I keep harping on about Jeff Jarvis’ book What Would Google Do? It’s funny in a way that in one of his first blogs about the book, he suggests that you could buy it from Borders. The thing was though that I couldn’t buy it from Borders at the time because they didn’t have it, so I bought it from Amazon.
• So I think that Borders and Whitcoulls need to start saying, what would Amazon do. So many companies are naive and believe their own hype that web retailers (only part of what they are) are no threat, or they consider them such a threat that when things go bad, they become a self fulfilling prophecy.

Hanging a few Kobo’s on the wall is not the answer, that has been a major botch up in my humble opinion. Even on the web, sell the sizzle on the home page! But some things they could do with their ‘loyalty’ programs is monitor what each customer buys and make recommendations based on the buyer habits. I have bought at least a dozen books on Amazon’s recommendations. Amazon is also much cheaper than buying locally, but that’s a different story because it costs a lot to get books to New Zealand, so unless you buy a stack of books, you pay back what you save on freight.

Amazon has many great features that can be just asdestination events

Mobile Marketing easily applied to a bricks and mortar chain, which has the benefit of being able to hold a book, tell you what store it is in and provide you with much quicker gratification.

I don’t want to write a book, but here a some things you may find in this blog in the coming days for Whitcoulls and Borders:

• Becoming a destination for events such as readings and signings
• Back to basics and way beyond in inventory management
• A major web presence with lots of ideas perhaps sparked by What Would Google Do (which should be a mandatory read for all Whitcoulls and Borders management at all levels)
• A new way for both stores to have lots of stock available, but not necessarily on the spot. A central warehouse with the option of home delivery could cut down inventory sizes without sacrificing range and depth.
• Embrace proximity based marketing on mobile devices. I would strongly recommend that management from Borders, Whitcoulls, Farmers and in fact all retail chains attend the Mobile Marketing Forum in Auckland this June. This Forum could be called The Retailer Strikes Back. They will learn many new ideas at this event.
• Understand their regional customer base. There is no point in carrying the same stock range in each store. It simply won’t work and you will have aged stock going on sale. Some of the category managers need to take a long hard look at the books they have been stocking and ask themselves what on earth possessed them to make some of the decisions they made? Or was it the publishers reps that conned them?
• They should look at products like GeoSmart’s impending Business Intelligence on a MAP. This could produce many aha moments when used to geographically view their business results in combination with consumer demographics.

I could go on but that’s plenty for now. I think with the right motivation and attitude, these two stores can be not only revived, but will rise to new heights. But only if they stop living in the past of this is the way we always did it. They need to embrace and perhaps even lead the future. It’s not hard, its just thinking outside the square and remembering that it is the customers and the books that make your business. Its about the words and the stories and people.

More on Location Based Applications and Privacy

In an article at LBS Zone, LeClairRyan attorney Kevin D. Pomfret says businesses should step forward to educate Congress and executive agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) about the breadth and scope of location-based technologies, as well as the industry’s enormous potential.

This is something I have been saying for some time in past blogs. If we get Location Based Services applications right, they can enrich our lives in so many aspects. For example:

• B2C Marketing. I would welcome personal location based marketing, based on my location, time and interests. Tell me if there is a hot deal on a new guitar pedal or music software as I drive past a music store on a Saturday. My girls would love to be told there is a 2 for 1 coupon on the latest summer fashion as they walk past a shop and their colors and sizes are in stock.
• Health and safety. If one of my relatives is ill and needs medical help while on vacation, a blind or disabled person becomes disoriented, a diabetic travels and forgets their insulin, a car’s airbags deploy on a remote country road. These are all instances where consumers can be aided by LBS apps and help directed to them with ease.
• Entertainment. Rugby World Cup year starts in less than 24 hours in New Zealand. Wouldn’t it be great if people can sign up to services that know where in the country they are, what they are interested in and can guide them to other activities based on time of day, interest and location? It could be golf, a cultural performance, Happy Hour, a concert or music festival, you could opt in before hand with your interests so if you are a ballet fan, you don’t get guided to a Christian Death Metal Grunge Fest.
• The Road Trip. An application that provides car navigation, access to traffic information, entertainment, allows you to connect to your social networks, upload photos and blog, find ‘friends’ close to you and more.

We’ll see more of these in 2011, along with apps from Facebook, Google, Apple, Foursquare, Groupon, Twitter and hundreds of others. But what about the risks?

When you sign up for these applications, do you know who you are giving access to? Do you know whether you can opt out? Do you know of the service has the ability to delete your information if you decide to opt out. Often the services themselves don’t have that ability because Google and other services have cached it and even if they delete it, it still exists in other places.

It is a well know fact that criminal elements already use sites such as Facebook to identify people they want to commit crimes against. It might be that they want your car, your jewellery, your 65″ 3D TV, all the Christmas presents you displayed on your profile, or just to ransack your house. It may be nothing to do with you, as they say in the movies “Nothing Personal, this is business”.

You could follow this thread and think, this guy is anti LBS. Wrong, its how I make my living. I love it for what it can do for me and you. I just worry about how it can be used and believe it is incumbent on the developers to make the applications as safe as possible, to provide privacy controls and make sure people know how to use them. They might also want to consider liability insurance. I’ve heard of insurance claims by people who drove their cars into rivers because their nav told them to turn right. It won’t be long before there are claims from people saying that it is the fault of the social media location application, which indirectly told a car ring that their expensive sports car would be parked at the airport for 2 weeks.

The article that set me off on today’s blog was about educating politicians, something that needs to happen all over the world, because these applications go international very quickly. It is also necessary to educate the developers because they are focussed on what they want people to be able to do with their apps, not the inherent risks of uses they hadn’t considered. I often want my ‘friends’ to know where I am, but I don’t want people who are not my ‘friends’ to know where I am or where I am not.

This is not my first blog motivated by Pomfret. In September I wrote about Location Based Apps and Trust, prior to that Proximity Based Marketing and Trust, and a whole series of blogs around Who’s Looking at You on Facebook. In one of them I thought up a name at random, searched for someone with that name and found out a huge amount of information about the person. I found it to be very scary, what I could find out about that person. Add location to that mix now and it could become downright dangerous.

Of course the tables can be turned on crims as well as law enforcement agencies can use the same apps to find out what they are up to and where.

Farmville and the new Virtual Economy

The computer gaming industry is of course massive and simulation games have been popular for a long time. Traditionally though, game makers made their money by selling games and upgrades for games. The SIMS being one of the best examples. I must admit to having enjoyed some of their games in the past, especially the classic Sim City.

Zynga has taken this to a whole new level of success with Farmville, a sim game which has become incredibly popular on Facebook. People pay real money to buy virtual tractors and other items in the game. This has now gone to such an extreme that Tesco is now about to start to sell real money vouchers in their stores.

In About Us on Zynga, they emphasize that their games are free, which is totally true, but there are elements in many of their games where you pay money to buy virtual things, or for example in the poker game, to buy back in to the weekly tournament if you lose your chips.

This adds an amazing dimension to this free game business. According to industry experts, as reported on Rev2.org, Zynga could be worth as much as US$5 Billion, which they predict could double in the next 5 years. Seems the concept of free and internet based games may have some commercial merit:)

Location Based Film

If you have been following my blogs, you’ll be aware that I am very passionate about the mobile and Location Based Services technologies. I am always checking out new concepts and many of them are variations on the same theme. This doesn’t make them less interesting, although one of the issues I want to work out is which ones offer a unique perspective that will allow them to be The Next Big Thing. That doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be the next Facebook or Twitter (which many people said was just a waste of time, in fact many are still saying it is going nowhere and won’t make money. You won’t hear that from me).

One that I recently found out about is GPS Film. GPS Film is an open source tool that allows film makers to produce a movie that people watch on their mobile smartphone. The film segments or chapters are triggered by the mobile being in certain locations. The example on the video below is a film called Nine Lives which was filmed in Singapore. The comedy which you watch on your iPhone or other Smartphone begins with a climax and then in order to see the rest of the film, you need to go to the locations where it the film was shot in order to see each clip. The GPS on the phone is the trigger to allow you to see the next scene.

This has amazing potential as a tourism tool. Imagine doing a road trip of New Zealand following a movie like Goodbye Pork Pie, or checking out some of the great spots in NY State from the movie Road Trip, where you have to be in those places to view each segment.

Now come a little back to earth and think about what you can do, and what Singapore has done with ‘Nine Lives‘. What a great entertaining way to explore a city. This looks to me to be a dream for tourism organisations. Given that it doesn’t have to offer a full cinematic experience, a cool film can be made with a modest budget, perhaps sponsored by businesses such as tourist attractions, accommodation providers, food and beverage chains, which would provide locations for segments of a movie. Did I mention it is Open Source?

This is definitely food for thought and a great opportunity around major events such as the Rugby World Cup next year. Check out this short video to see what I mean.

Another Reason Why Newspapers Will Fade Away

This morning for the 2nd time in 2 weeks my NZ Herald wasn’t delivered. This happened a couple of times previously with the Sunday Herald which was actually the one I used to enjoy the most. After the 2nd time I cancelled it. Two weeks ago when my Saturday Herald didn’t turn up, I tried to call them and got a voice message saying that I had called outside of working hours. I thought to myself that perhaps reading hours might disappear as well and this morning I told them that 3 strikes and they could say goodbye to my subscription.

This is one of the reasons why newspapers are on the way out. Not only are they reliant on people who really don’t want to go out on wet cold dark winter mornings, but a printed newspaper is becoming so inefficient.

I get headline tweets from the NZ Herald along with 1,648 other people, with links to the stories I want to read. Online I can see the headlines and major stories on their homepage and then I can see the headlines for each section and go straight to the stories that interest me. The Herald is only one publication I subscribe to on Twitter, there are several news services that flick past me on the side of my browser using Twitbin which is a Firefox plugin.

I also use iGoogle for my RSS feed. This gives me the latest news on all the topics I want to keep up to date on. That includes lots of streams around topics such as GPS, LBS, Psychology, Music and much more. It updates itself automatically all day and I can see which stories I have read in case my memory fails me.

Twitter of course is also a great vehicle for getting the latest news about anything. It told me that there was an earthquake in LA just as I boarded a plane there, although it turned out to be inconsequential. It told me what was going on in Iran and even if you can’t spell swine flu you’ll find out what’s happening to real people like Izzy who just found out her brother has it.  If you could spell it correctly you’ll find out what is happening, which famous people have just caught it and more than you’ll ever want to know.

I started off saying that newspapers are closing and you probably thought I was exaggerating didn’t you. Well think again. Here are a few examples.

• The Seattle Post-Intelligencer closed over 146 years and is considering continuing online.
• Colorado’s oldest newspaper The Rocky Mountain Times has run out of time.
• Michigan’s Ann Arbor News has closed after 174 years.

Of course there are also stories around the world talking about job cuts in the newspaper industry like this one in the Guardian.

This doesn’t mean, of course that we don’t want news. Of course we do, but we have new vehicles that are far more efficient, we now have a choice, in fact we’re spoiled for it. Did you wait for news about Michael Jackson’s death to appear in the newspaper? Of course not, it was on every TV news channel and you got it up to date. By the time the newspapers came out, the stories that were in it, such as him not being dead, but only in a coma, had long since been refuted.

The big problem for the print media companies, is that they don’t know how, or if they can monetise the online media. There are of course ways that they can do this, but they have to switch their thinking, which is so enrenched in ‘this is the way we’ve always done it’ that many of them won’t be doing it at all in the future. Sounds a lot like the recording industry doesn’t it?

Proximity Based Marketing and Trust

In a previous blog I talked about how brands such as Subway could use Location Based Services (LBS) to promote their products to school students as a next step from their service where you can text your order through to the store. Location (x3) used to be the mantra of the retail industry, especially when consumers didn’t move far from their homes or work area. Of course today people are far more mobile.

I have frequently spoken about the value of PR as being far superior to advertising, which is a major problem for advertisers themselves. With Tivo, MySky and other services we can avoid TVC’s and with more and more people going online for their news, the advertising in print gets less views. The key point I make though is that people don’t trust advertising. In my Geosmart Blog, I wrote about the impact of this and the need to find different ways to deal with this.

Earlier this year in Amsterdam I spoke to a number of people who are developing expertise in the areas of social networking’ LBS and proximity based marketing and a common thread to this was in fact trust.

The marketers tell us that if the guys wear Lynx hygiene products, the girls will come running. In a previous blog, Why Do People Still Smoke? I showed a video of a doctor expousing the benefits of smoking. It’s no wonder that marketers and sales people are often looked at as shiny shoed spin doctors.

In 2006 Gallup asked pollsters to rate the values and ethics of a number of industry groups. Advertisers scored 11% on the high trust scale. Harris did a similar poll the same year and found that in contrast 66% of people trusted the ordinary man or woman in the street.

Amongst the changes that are happening in many areas these days are consumer advocates. Because people don’t trust advertising, and in many cases with good cause, they are turning to other consumers for advice. When I went to Jamaica a couple of years ago, I used Travelocity to read reviews from people who stayed at various resorts and used their feedback to book my stay and was pleased to find everything as I expected. As a consequence, I also used them to make my booking.

If 66% of consumers are happy to trust the man in the street, then what if we could give them access to their peers. This is of course where social networking comes in. Typically in a social networking environment, whether it is Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, doesn’t matter, we end up developing online relationships (and real ones) with people that we associate with, that share our values and interests.

Mobile phones now offer a vehicle to extend the social networks into location. People now meet up in different parts of the world as a consequence of their location. I can use a number of applications to ask people in my network about local shops, accomodation or anything else. If I’m in LAX  for 6 hours waiting for a connecting flight, I can go onto Twitter on my mobile and see if any of my friends are nearby, or ask them what’s worth seeing, where is a good place for a coffee or a meal etc. I will then get their recommendation based on their local knowledge or experience. I can trust their feedback.

So I was talking about Proximity Based Marketing. If consumer advocacy is the most reliable form of marketing, there is an opportunity for brands to harness this. Off course the codicil is that they have to provide a great product or service because otherwise the mention will be poor and they need to be consistent.

One concept I’ve considered is a loyalty program around a hospitality brand, it could be a chain of bars, cafes or any other organisation. They could have a program whereby you got rewards for bringing other people to their establishment. For example, use a social network around their brand (a starting point could be as simple as a Facebook Fan Page) and then use your mobile to see which of your friends are in the neighbourhood. You could have an impromptu meet up at Starbucks and have the ability to send your friends an electronic coupon on their mobile, together with turn by turn directions and a map, to show them how to get there.

I’ve blogged previously about distressed inventory and Proximity Based Marketing. Imagine you go to the Cirque du Soleil and book via your ticket agency who is also a social networking site, such as EventFinder. A few hours before the show you get a TXT message offering you a deal if you can entice some other people to come along. You then use the location part of their application on your mobile to see where your friends are (as I do with Google Latitude) and send them a message with an electronic coupon to join you at the show, with a 40% discount.

A number of popular web portals, such as AA Maps, Wises, Google, allow you to rate / review businesses or locations on their portal. Wouldn’t it be good if you could access this data on your mobile in real time? But it would be even better if you can link a real time recommendation from a ‘friend’ to a location based service. Where’s a good place to get a coffee at Miami Beach? A friend replies with a name of a cafe, which automatically gets linked to their geocode (location coordinates) and as your mobile knows where you are, it can then request and display turn by turn directions and the map. The friend then adds, “If you can get there for 2PM I’ll meet you there.”

All the pieces are already in place and Beta sites are starting to pop up, offering these sorts of services. GeoSmart can provide the tools and data required for New Zealand and are already working with parties to support better maps and Location Based Service for New Zealand. Perhaps you should start thinking about how you can use location and consumer advocacy to drive forward your business.

If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)

Vote for me on NetGuide Web Awards:)

While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)