Getting into the flow with 500px

A while ago, photo sharing site 500px.com launched their new interface. Where Flickr hasn’t updated their interface for years (that’s decades in internet time), it’s nice to see 500px set an example of where things might be going in the future of online photo sharing. The new interface looks decidedly fresh and has a couple of things I really like:

Flow

500px took a good look at what makes for a compelling presentation for images and came up with “flow”. Just like Facebook’s timeline, it’s based on the idea that a stream of information doesn’t necessarily look very compelling when presented in a straightforward grid or list. Instead, they use a dynamic layout that shows images in different sizes and aspect ratios. In this format, you get a nice presentation of your own images mixed with the ones you liked. But it doens’t stop there, which brings us to the next topic...

Curation

Online photo sharing is great, but there’s always the question of how to find photographers and images you really like among the millions of mediocre uploads. There has to be some mechanism to filter the good stuff from the rest. And not just the good stuff in general, but the stuff that’s good according to your personal taste.

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The most successful brands

The most successful brands of the future will be the ones that enable people to talk about them. Note that I didn’t say “talk in a positive way”. That part you can only influence by putting out a high quality product, and having equally good customer service. Once you have those two things in place (and if you don’t, sorry, I can’t help you) the key part is to engage with your audience and help them spread the word, which they will gladly do.

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Tweet of mouth

Twitter is rolling out a new retweet functionality to a select group of - probably random - users, including yours truly. Instead of retweeting someone’s original tweet by inserting “RT” and the username of the original author before it, you click a designated retweet button. Your followers then get to see the original tweet in their twitter stream, with the user icon of the original author.

I think that Twitter is overlooking one crucial aspect of social media here. Whenever I retweet something, it means that I want to tell my followers about something interesting I’ve seen elsewhere. The person who retweets puts the original message in a certain context, and lends it credibility. They can do that explicitly, by adding a few words of their own, or implicitly, just because you know who they are and what kind of stuff they’re interested in. It’s sort of like word of mouth. When a friend tells you about something he heard from someone else, you can put in into context because you know what kind of a person your friend is.

Now however, tweets from random strangers show up in my timeline, and I have to look at the small print below to see who retweeted them. And even then I have no idea why, because the retweeter can’t add their own comments. In the analog world that would be the equivalent of a total stranger randomly starting to tell you a story, instead of a friend telling you the story they heard from that person and why they thought it was interesting. What’s more: the retweets seem to show up on the Twitter website, and not in my desktop client (Tweetie).

The thing about Twitter seems to be that it’s so brilliantly simple that you can’t seem to add anything new to it without making it worse. I’m curious to see where this is going, but for now I can only conclude: RT #fail.

Being everywhere

If you publish audio, video or photos on the web you will have to choose which site or service to use. The alternative is to just post them everywhere. Websites like Tubemogul allow you to upload videos to multiple sites at one with just one click of the mouse. The advantage is that you - in theory - reach more people. Some people hang out on YouTube while others frequent Vimeo and yet others use Viddler.

This "being everywhere" approach is what I use so far for IceScapes.tv. There are some drawbacks though. Sometimes you have to render your video in a different format because one of the sites doesn't accept the format you perfer. You might have to limit the length of the description of your video to the lowest common denominator. Some services accept more tags and keywords than others. The result is that you sometimes end up doing a quite a bit of extra work for each video.

So is it worth it? It depends... IceScapes.tv seems to get the most exposure and the most viewer comments on Vimeo so far. Some episodes occasionally get a few thousand views on one of the other sites, but then the next episode might get 2 views on that same site. I guess the conclusion is that you have to find the community that fits your content, and if you have some extra time on your hands, you can try to generate some extra exposure via other channels. On the other hand, I believe that social media and online sharing is going to shift from a numbers game (who has the most followers, the most views) to focusing on meaningful interactions. In that respect I'm tempted to ignore the viewer stats and just focus my energy on one or two platforms that generate some real interaction with the viewers.

What's your approach? Being everywhere or focus on a couple of sites that work for you? I'd love to hear your reaction the comments.

Marketing 2.0: dare to share

Example #1: Whenever camera manufacturers launch a new product, they create some nice sales collateral (i.e. brochures, ads, etc.) that makes you want to buy their stuff. So when Nikon introduced their new D90 model, they hired pro-photographer Chase Jarvis to shoot a cool brochure that makes you feel like all you need to do is run out and get a D90 and you'll be well on your way to become the next, well, Chase Jarvis.

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