Monthly Archives: July 2012

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10 tips every iphoneographer should know

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A new ebook by BlissDom founder Alli Worthington (@alliworthington), is a hyperfocus look at the world of iPhoneography.

Want to take better photos with your iPhone? Wondering about how to monetize your visual content? iPhone Photography: The Visual Guide  is a picture guide book with step-by-step tutorials targeted towards bloggers and anyone employed to share social visual content.

Here are 10 tips:

1. Get close up. IPhone photography is perfect for taking lots of close up shots of your subject. Don’t stand over that baby and take a picture! Take four or five shots and capture toes, a smiling face, chubby hands and belly.

2. Never, ever zoom. Zooming in on your subject with a mobile camera destroys the quality of your picture. Simply edit and crop the picture later to zoom in on what you want included.

3. Don’t be a flasher. Why do we all look fabulous in professional photos? Lots of diffuse light, of course. Now what happens when a teeny harsh light shoots out of your camera on someone’s face? Yep, it’s not pretty. Turn your flash off and thank me later.

4. Clean the lens. It sounds so simple, but we often forget to wipe the schmutz off the camera lens.

5. Use new angles. Don’t take pictures standing up and only moving your arms to move your camera around. Bend those knees and take pictures from an interesting low angle, or stand above the subject and shoot straight down. Get moving and let your feet be the zoom you in on the shot.

6. Light Matters. The iPhone camera is so cool, it can almost bake a cake. Well, not yet. But what it can’t do is take decent pictures in a low light setting. Pictures come out all grainy and noisy. Instead of flashing just go with the grainy vibe and make it all grungy like you planned it.

7. Use editing apps to post process. The easiest app with lots of filters is Magic Hour. Sure, you can make your own filters and adjust curves and details, but it is also great for pre-made flattering filters. Add text to your images with apps like Over or Phonto. There are a quadrillion photo editing apps that make it all easy fun and very often free.

8. GeoLocation in moderation. Unless you want the entire Internet to know exactly where you live, always find the settings gear icon on your apps and turn geolocation and Facebook auto sharing off.

9. Plan for how to use your pictures. If you want to print, sell or license your iphone pictures be sure to save them in a high-res setting. Have you ever tried to print an Instagram picture? Pretty grainy, right? Unless you use Instagram as your camera and then share, all Instgrams are uploaded as low resolution. That is the secret of why Instagram is so fast. If you want to save your favorite images to print or sell later, use an editing app like Camera+ or Photogene 2 and save a large high resolution picture.

10. Get organized. Take pictures of everything. Need to remember what level you parked your car on in that ginormous garage? Take a picture. Too bust to write down what you need at the grocery? Take a picture of your open fridge. We are busy, we have to remember insane details for work, our family and every thing else. Don’t bother remember little details. Just take a quick picture and voila! Instant memory minus the headache.

If this sparked your interest and you want the entire book, it’s available for $9.97.

I am in no way compensated to review this book. 

(Photos courtesy of Alli Worthington)

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FAVE TIP: HOW TO evolve your PR efforts with social collaboration [part 1]

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A few weeks ago, Jennifer Gosse (@jennifergosse) and I had the privilege to speak with the attendees of The Evolution of Women in Social Media conference (@evoconf). Our four-hour training session focused on The Evolution of PR: A Culture of Collaboration, Connection and Community. Over the next few weeks I’m going to offer best practices and tips in order to help you make more out of your time spent with social media.

Here are a few of my fave tips from our session:

Tips on how to evolve your PR with social collaboration
Listly by Sarah Evans

Tips on how to evolve your PR with social collaboration

The best tips from participants in the training session Jennifer Gosse (@jennifergosse) and Sarah Evans (@prsarahevans) gave at #evoconf in July 2012.

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    1. TIP: Create tasks that launch when a news piece runs about you/your company.

      TIP: Create tasks that launch when a news piece runs about you/your company.

      After the hard work of getting a media placement is done, it actually isn't. Add tasks like: thanking the writer on their site and via email, adding large placements to your email signature line and website, etc...

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      • TIP: Don't limit yourself to email for a pitch.

        TIP: Don't limit yourself to email for a pitch.

        Journalists, bloggers and online influencers spend their time outside the "inbox," so you should, too. If they're active online, consider a tweet, private message via Facebook or even a Pinterest pitch.

        www.tracky.com

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        • TIP: Remember it's "relationships before tasks."

          TIP: Remember it's "relationships before tasks."

          Part of the power of collaboration is that it forces you to interact with others. When more people are added to the mix, the more essential it is to have a strong relationship. Focus on relationship tasks throughout the collaboration process.

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          • TIP: Always think "social visual" when creating content.

            TIP: Always think "social visual" when creating content.

            We live in the age of Pinterest, Fancy, Instagram and the like... As my friend Jason Kinzler says, "If your idea of PR is sitting in front of a desk and opening a Word doc, you're seriously out of luck." What images can best help tell your story?

            www.tracky.com

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            • TIP: Use @IFTTT to automate online actions which typically take a lot of time.

              TIP: Use @IFTTT to automate online actions which typically take a lot of time.

              Get familiar with ifttt (@ifttt) (www.ifttt.com). Set up recipes to alert you via text message, phone call or email when media make a specific action (e.g. blog post).

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              • TIP: Use @Newsle to make monitoring and responding to journalists and peers easy

                TIP: Use @Newsle to make monitoring and responding to journalists and peers easy

                When your friends make the news, we make sure you know. Newsle tracks news about your friends and professional contacts across the web. You'll never miss an important story about someone you care about.

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                • TIP: Stop the glorification of busy.

                  TIP: Stop the glorification of busy.

                  It's tough to eliminate the word busy from your lexicon, but you might want to consider it. Productive people are the ones getting things done (#gtd) and the "busy" often don't remember how they spent their time.

                  www.tracky.com

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                  • TIP: Make Instagram work for you.

                    TIP: Make Instagram work for you.

                    To monitor and collaborate via Instagram, use Statigr.am (or Hootsuite) from your desktop. Create lists of bloggers, journalists and influencers.

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                    • TIP: Use PinAlerts to notify you each time someone "pins" your stufff

                      TIP: Use PinAlerts to notify you each time someone "pins" your stufff

                      Setup free PinAlerts in seconds, and
                      receive email notifications whenever
                      someone pins something from your website.

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                      • TIP: Remember the 4 C's for productive collaboration

                        TIP: Remember the 4 C's for productive collaboration

                        Connect
                        Collaborate
                        Condense
                        Communicate

                        www.tracky.com

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                        View more lists from Sarah Evans

                        Have a tip you’d like to include? Go ahead, it’s a collaborative list about collaboration.

                        ***NOTICE: I am currently serving as the Chief Evangelist for Tracky. Any reference to them in any post is part of my mission to spread the word about social collaboration.***

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                        FAVE SOCIAL: Vermont is the first state to let citizens manage Twitter account with @ThisisVT

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                        The @ThisisVT Twitter handle launches today, organized by The Vermont Department of Tourism and Marketing with new authors tweeting weekly.

                        Vermont residents can now use an “official” Twitter account to share why they love to work, play and live in Vermont. This uncensored account is a first for the U.S. Both Sweden and The Netherlands were the first countries to launch such a campaign in 2012.

                        “Vermonters are unique, with equally unique reasons for why they live in, and love Vermont,” Deputy Commissioner Steve Cook said. “This social media platform offers a tremendous opportunity for Vermonters to showcase their experiences and the Vermont Tourism team aims to share these stories with visitors or those considering relocating to our state.”

                        Do you want to tweet for your state? Go to www.thisisvt.com/nominate to apply.

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                        FAVE SOCIAL: A ‘grand experiment’ lets you tweet one piece of advice you wish you knew then

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                        “If I only knew this a few years ago.” What if you could share that advice with the world? Now, anyone in the world can add a “what I wish I knew then” tweet to public Twitter account, @AYoungerMe.

                        The founders of Buffer are at it again, this time with an experiment to crowdsource advice. Not just any advice, the kind of advice you wish your “younger self” would have known.

                        How? It only takes one email. Send an email to ayoungerme@to.bufferapp.com and  anything in the subject line and is under 140 characters will be your Tweet. 

                        ayoungerme@to.bufferapp.com

                        In case you’re more of a visual person, it looks something like this:

                        After you click send, your email gets added to a queue in a Buffer account for this experiment. Every hour a new tweet from the queue is posted to Twitter. Pretty cool, as long as no knuckleheads try to hijack it and ruin it for the rest of us.

                        Remember the, “Milk, it does a body good,” ad campaigns of the early 90′s? It showed young, scrawny, often “nerd-like” adolescents watching themselves turn into athletic, popular and beautiful adults (all from drinking milk).  The @AYoungerMe experiment makes up for having to watch those (if you’re a child of the 90′s like I am).

                        What was your advice?

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                        FAVE APP: Search your favorite hashtag in multimedia style with Sees[.]aw

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                        Sick and tired of the same old, boring text-heavy Twitter hashtag search? Here comes Sees.aw to make keeping up with your fave hashtags both more visually appealing and productive.

                        Hashtags, hashtags, hashtags. What’s in a hashtag? A whole heck of a lot, actually. Searching hashtags during a live event allows you to find others with a shared interest, archive notes and soundbites, share multimedia content to name a few. In the past, viewing a live scrolling hashtag from your desktop meant following plain text. While you can get information, it is pretty one dimensional and doesn’t allow the incorporation of robust content people share.

                        Seesaw gives you a different way to: view hashtagged content, archive it (as in “saw”) and share it with others. Since we now live in a social visual (read: Pinterest) world, images done well make all the difference. If people using your hashtag include a photo or video in their tweet, it shows up in the scrolling feed. And don’t worry, if the hashtag is moving too fast, you can pause the feed (along with other commands) from the left hand column.

                        Want to highlight an additional key phrase within the hashtag search? You can do that, too. Seesaw shows those tweets with a highlighted box.

                        My fave feature about this app is the ability to save and share content from the hashtag search. You can archive all of your favorite tweets to a single page which you can then make accessible to anyone else.

                        Have you been waiting for an app like Seesaw? Use something else? Let me know.

                        Thank you to the awesome Ted Rubin (@tedrubin) for passing this along to me.