NYR - Grow your Model/Photo Career - Part 2

Hopefully 2 days was enough time to get through my last war-and-peace size post.

Tonight I want to talk a little about managing your social stream. I'm not sure if anyone else has coined this term so, to start, I'll define it:
Social Stream: The total collection of information you provide over the Internet. This would be any content you provide over Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, Twitter or any other social network that is made available to your friends connected to you on that network.

Your social stream (as a model or photographer or business owner) serves two key purposes:
1. Obviously these networks keep you connected to personal friends.
2 This provides a platform for targeted marketing and promotion.

Let's be honest, there's a few basic business principles that everybody can agree on:
1. It's cheaper to keep an existing customer than it it to acquire a new one
2. People you have a personal connection with are more apt to do business with you compared to people who don't know you.

So based on these things marketing yourself within your social network accomplishes two key things to a successful marketing plan. Plus - most of this stuff costs you nothing but your time when done over the Internet. While we all agree time is money as an independent business owner time is easily subsidized as "free" and besides, if done right it's an investment which will return income in the end anyway.

As a model/photographer you social stream has the benefit of consisting of a variety of content including text, pictures, blog posts, posts of other valuable information you find, etc.

Using your social stream as an effective form of marketing should take into consideration the following:
-Keep a balance of personal and promotional messaging. Remember, you social stream consists mainly of friends (especially starting out). Don't bury your friends with sales promotions, they'll soon ignore everything you post writing it up to just another commercial.
-Use varied media. Everyone has their own preferred content to consume. Some like blogs, others like pictures, others like personal notes. Keep a good mix of content to ensure you've got messaging that appeals to as many people as possible.
-Don't be afraid to get personal. The power of personalized marketing is huge. Sending someone a note just to them has the greatest impact. Make an effort to reach out personally to your contacts from time to time in addition to your "mass media" messages.
-Be consistent. This one is as much for me as everyone else and there's a balance you need to find. To much content and people will ignore it. To little content and people lose interest and stop paying attention, or it just gets missed all together. You'll probably have some trial and error to figure out what the right interval and content mix is right for your audience.

-Try to unify your social stream to a single platform. Your social stream can include a blend of different sources. If you have people following your stream at each source you either have people only getting a portion of your social stream or people have to piece together your stream themselves by joining all your networks individually...which isn't optimal and in most cases the former happens, not the latter. So here's yet another great benefit of Facebook (really they're not paying me to promote their site, I promise). Facebook allows you to import a variety of other social content which is then is displayed and accessible on your Facebook account (to your Facebook contacts). By funneling all your content to a single source your contacts can consume your complete social steam from one point.

Model industry specific sites like OMP and Model Mayhem are excellent resources to market yourself - while unable to be integrated into your social stream like Facebook allows these sites connect you with an audience focused solely around the industry which grows your contacts. And honestly alot of the people you'll find/meet through these sites probably have a Facebook page, which you can then add to your social stream anyway....remember it's all about networking.

So Happy New Year...and yes I did celebrate tonight. Much of this post was prewritten before tonight. So here's to a new year of new business.