Today I got an Invite from an old friend of mine to join Google+.
Everything that I had been reading, suggested that Invites were still hard to get and Google was reducing the amount of Invites being sent out.
So I was very happy to get an offer from my friend Steve.
It was easy to sign up my account via my Gmail address, and I spent a few minutes checking out the details that had been imported into my profile.
After making a few corrections, I went up to Facebook, and posted that I had a new Google+ account!
Almost immediately, a few my friends started to request Invites, which I still need to send, but haven’t figured out how to yet…
But then one of my local photography contacts, Mike, suggested that I check out a Washington Post article that talked about Google’s Terms of Service (TOS) and how it related to posting of photographic images.
Initially I was very shocked, and proceeded to read the cited blog posting by Scott Bourne on photofocus.com.
Which further made me reconsider moving all my images to another environment, and was nothing I was looking forward to, after having just joined JPGmag within the past week.
I posted the two links above, onto several of my Facebook pages, looking to get some input from my connections.
After some dinner and television, it was off to bed for the kids.
As the house began to quiet down, I was able to put on my shows, and begin my nightly surfing of the Internet.
Still very intrigued by the Scott Bourne posting, and decided to do a little bit more research.
Being a creature of habit, I fired up my Firefox, and went to Google to start my search, using the search term “Google+ +Photo +TOS”, and began to read the results.
About three-quarters of the way down the page, I noticed an article that included the term “social media” in the Title, which I thought was rather odd considering my search criteria, so I clicked.
As I started the skim Colby Brown’s blog post, I noticed he was the teacher, and he thought it was important to stay ahead of the game in regards to social media when teaching his students – I very much agree.
Mr. Brown also writes about the older photography business models, and suggested some new marketing opportunities based on common practices used when posting to social networking sites such as Facebook, Flickr and Twitter.
I agree with Mr. Brown full wholeheartedly in the fact that photographers can not give away things for free, but at the same time, in the older business model, it was quite common for photographers to spend money on Mailings of prints or slides of their work.
Those Mailings, have now been replaced by the 72dpi images that he is suggesting, and in the name of the game in the photography business, is to get your work in front of as many eyeballs as possible.
His article just made sense, and I commend him for his observations and thoughts.
Thank you!
Thankfully, I did not delete my jpeg files that I had generated for JPGmag, so now I just need the time to start some more posting!