I will share the fundamental concepts of crafting your brand story through the focal lens of social media. Special attention will be paid to the platforms that are designed for photo sharing such as pinterest, tumblr, and instagram.

I was invited out to speak by ASMP San Diego and the event is being graciously hosted by the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park. Check-in will begin at 6:30pm on Feb 28th and the program will begin in the auditorium at 7pm. Admission is $10 for ASMP members, APA members, PPSDC members, and MOPA members. General public admission is $12.

Adrian Dayton is an attorney with a passion for growing law practices through the power of social media. We met through twitter about a year ago and meet bi-monthly for lunch to discuss our respective consulting practices.

We’ve often discussed how our websites and social media profile pictures are the first impression that we give to any perspective clients. I always remind clients that the quality of your imagery reflects the quality of your brand in the minds of your customers.

Adrian is in the process of branding his practice. He had invested in a (soon to be released) new website and graphic design services for his marketing collateral. So it was definitely time for us to put together some high quality images to be used across his different marketing channels.

If you’re a lawyer, I’d highly recommend giving Adrian a tweet to discuss how he can help you with your social media marketing for your practice.

While I was in Salt Lake City during this years All-You-Can-Jet trip, I had the opportunity to hang out with John Barbieri.  We put together an impromptu photo shoot for his new press kit.

It was awesome watching all the skaters thrash their way around Salt Lake City’s finest skate spots. We hung out with his crew most of the day, then stopped at an All-You-Can-Eat Sushi bar that played MXC on infinite loop. We spent our last two hours in town shooting this series of images.

Brand imaging will make you look more professional, no matter what you do. Artists, Musicians, Athletes, and Small Business owners can all gain an advantage in the market place by having great photographs to sell themselves with. We live in an image based society, how do you present yourself to the world?

We spent the evening drinking $4 Beers with Free Pizza at Alligator Lounge in Brooklyn. We hung out on the subway and interacted with hipsters.

In the morning, we headed in to Manhattan and had a delicious breakfast sandwich on an “Everything Bagel” at Bagel and Shmear (E. 28th St.).  Our next destination was the Museum of Sex (233 5th Ave) which was unfortunately, much less debaucherous than we had hoped.  The gift store is honestly the most riske part of the establishment, most of the other exhibits were kind of clinical and dry.  Although there was one display entitled “Mallard Duck Homosexual Necrophelia” which was funny, outlandish, and included a video (Also an excellent band name).

After the Museum of Sex we continued down 5th Ave towards the park.  I snapped some photos of New York City tourist staples and we visited a few gift shops to take photos of things that we would never buy.

When we arrived at Central Park South, we strolled around and people watched for a while.  Then my technolust got the better of me.  I busted out c:geo on my android and we found this sneaky geocache after a solid 20 minutes of searching.

On our way back to our host’s place in Ridgewood, we stopped at Five Guys (36 W. 48th) and grabbed a totally rocking Jalapeño, Mushroom, Lettuce, Barbecue Burger – complete with french fries made from locally sourced potatoes.

After dinner we ran in to the first problem of the trip.  In an effort to catch a train, we ran down the stairs and jumped on board before we realized it was the wrong line.  Four stops later we realized our error and had to make the return trip to get back to the M line.  This detour put us about 45 minutes off of our schedule.

Luckily, we leveraged the technology at our disposal and were able to check-in to our flight via the mobile web and find a car service to pick us up as soon as we got back home.  Our flight was scheduled to depart at 7:50pm bound for Denver, our car service arrived at 7:00pm – the traffic gods smiled upon us and we made it from Queens to JFK in about 22 minutes flat.  However, when we arrived to print out tickets at the Kiosk our reservation had been cancelled since we were inside of 90 minutes of our flight when we confirmed them (oops). We ran across the terminal and cut the line, then I quickly sweet talked an agent in to calling the gate and giving us our boarding passes.  We hustled our way through security and sprinted across T5 just in time to board the plane.

We were rewarded for our efforts with a 45 minute wait on the tarmac due to high winds.  We arrived in Denver about and hour late.  Our host (and Architectural Photographer) Richard Douglas picked us up at the airport and brought us to his house in Golden, CO to crash for the evening.

Check out the rest of our ‘All-You-Can-Jet’ photos and order prints in the on-line store.

Next Stop: Denver!

I caught up with Morgan Johnston, Greg Krause, and Matt McCall; friends from last years http://www.twelvehoursinacity.com project.

JetBlue threw a nice party in T-5, with plenty of sweet #AYCJ shwag for all the jetters in attendance. Dunkin Donuts provided free coffee and donuts for people to socialize over. The New York Jets ‘Flight Crew’ also stopped by to entertain the masses and provide some excellent photo ops.

Marty St. George stirred up the party when he announced a new plane in the jetBlue fleet named “All-Blue-Can-Jet” which features a new livery design.

After catching up on some e-mail and developing some quick bug fixes for http://www.netsetjet.com. Amber and I parted with our #AYCJ friends and headed for Meg’s house in Brooklyn/Queens.

At the t-5 taxi terminal, our driver ended up in a screaming match with the Port Authority officer.  The confrontation was resolved quickly as our driver sped off screaming obscenities with us in the back preparing for the worse.  However, our travelers luck held strong and we made it to Queens without further incident.

We hung out on a stoop in  Ridgewood/Bushwick waiting for Meg to show up.  Then we took a nap and prepared for this evenings festivities.  Catching up with old friends and trying to sneak in a photo shoot if I can find a model and the time.

Please take a moment to write a comment about this post if you enjoyed it, let me know what type of photos you’d like to see more of on the rest of the trip.

Safe Travels,

Clark

Amber and I headed down to my family’s cottage on Keuka lake as a quick vacation before “All-You-Can-Jet” — we thought it would be a great way to relax before my national speaking tour.  We took the opportunity to use it as a dry-run to test out our workflows and make sure we didn’t forget to pack anything.

Here are some photos from the first day of our trip.

As a word of caution, there can be up to a 5 minute delay in propagation when I add things to my version of this calendar before it gets syndicated to the site. The available dates exist between Sept. 7th, 2009 and Oct. 6th, 2010.
 Please make sure to double check the date or better yet,  give me a call (716) 222-0237 before trying to book a venue.

Sharing Stories:

Last year, I was lucky and was able to tell my story in a BIG way.  Sharing my content and images through a blog and making over 30 media appearances in major publications around the globe.  It was fun, it was exciting, it was selfish.

One of the things that bothered me through out the trip last year was the fact that our “party to-go” marathon around the US received a ton of media coverage and that altruistic projects like Greg Krause’s 30dayonjetblue.com ended up as a foot note in the concluding paragraphs.  It was an interesting problem, how could I solve it?

By Creating a community!

I spoke at the JetBlue Executive Leadership Conference at West Point last year and told them; next year build the scaffold, the community will develop around it organically.

I believe they did a good job using the tools that they were able to use (as a corporation with a legal department and communications guidelines, I’m sure they were somewhat limited by the liability openness exposes the brand to [remember the skittles fiasco]).  I believe that Morgan Johnston and the JetBlue Communications team have done incredible things with their twitter community, facebook pages, blog, and flickr pool.  They really use those channels to their fullest and have created the playbook that other businesses try and replicate.  But, a community of loosely coupled travellers, criss-crossing the western hemisphere, in real time; need more connectivity, more openness, and they need it aggregated in one place.

What AllYouCanJetwork.com NetSetJet.com brings to the table:

So this year, lets build a thriving and interactive community of jet-setters based around a portal.

Enter All You Can Jetwork NetSetJet.com — a community site for everyone to enjoy this culture phenomenon.

Implemented Features:

• Live Twitter feed of #AYCJ
• Community Forum
• Flickr Integration – Grabs photos tagged AYCJ
• AYCJ Community Blog Aggregator (Contact me to have your blog added to our feeds)

Features coming soon

• User Profiles
  • Website URL
  • Foursquare URL (Used to populate our map)
  • Facebook URL
  • Twitter Handle
  • CouchSurfer URL
• Foursquare/Google Maps Mash-up – Showing our users locations around the US! (Find out which other AYCJ’ers are in the same city as you)
• Community Wiki – Share tips on travelling and list cool places to visit in all the AYCJ cities!
• Live Twitter Feed of @jetblue/aycj
• OAuth Integration: Log-in using twitter or facebook to authenticate.

What can you do?

Share stories, images, video, and make new friends.  The spirit of AYCJ is laced with adventure, so take the plunge! Visit http://www.allyoucanjetwork.com and register.  The team and I hope to have the rest of our feature set developed in this next week.  We want to keep refining the experience and adding fun ideas to the project throughout the month of September.

Leave a comment and give us your ideas!

So what’s on the agenda for AYCJ 2010?

This year has been about personal growth,  I’ve spent the last 12 months building a photography business.  I focus mostly on portraits and events in my business, but I also had a wonderfully informative 3-month internship with Rhea Anna a national level commercial shooter.   My experience this year has really enforced two things, 1) Photography is in the middle of a huge paradigm shift and it scares photographers to death and 2) I still have a ton to learn about the art form of photography and the science of running a successful  business.

I believe that I can use my 2010 AYCJ pass to help show my peers the light at the end of the tunnel while developing my skill sets.  I have recently been listed as a “Recommend Speaker” by the American Society of Media Photographers for my talk on Using Social Media to build your Business.  ASMP has chapters in almost every major city in the United States and those chapters all have incredibly talented photographers.

The plan is pretty simple:

1. I find chapters that want to learn more about Social Media (I can fly there for free!)
2. They agree to host me while I’m in their city (Food and Accommodations… I’ll sleep on floors and eat Ramen though – no worries!)
3. They peer me with a photographer for a shoot during my stay (so I can work on my skills and create interesting content for my readers — that’s you!)
4. I promote my talk using my network (Hopefully, bringing some new faces in to the chapter.)
5. I give a talk to their chapter (They learn how to build relationships with clients using Social Media Tools.)
6. Chapter passes the hat (This dude has fixed costs to cover, I usually charge $500-$1,000 for an hour long talk to a chapter)
7. I take the images and lessons learned from the day and post them on this blog and share them with my readers (My mentor for the day gets to show his work to my 3,000 fans!)

What will you talk about?

1. How we achieved brand recognition during Twelve Hours in a City (We also maxed out at around 3,500 fans)
2. Best Practices for Twitter and Facebook
3. The Grammar of Twitter
4. Social Networking Mores
5. Strategies for engaging fans and building your base
6. How to build from your existing mailing lists
7. Along with a few funny anecdotes from the First Project

It will be a revised version of my Social Media for Photographer’s talk, it has received great reviews from attendees.

How can I book you to speak for free in my city?

1. Live in an AYCJ city or be prepared to pick me/drop me off in one (I’m talking to you Boulder, CO!)
2. Book a space for an hour and a half, some evening between Sept 7 – Oct 6 (Projector and Project-able Surface is a must!)
3. Actively promote my talk (I’d much rather speak to 100 people than 10; You can charge people to raise money for your group — I’ll promote it using my networks too)
4. Agree to Pick me up from the Airport, Feed Me, Give me a Couch to crash on, and most importantly drop me off at the Airport on-time for my flight.
5. (Optionally) Find me a photographer and/or models to work with.
6. E-mail Me (clark@clarkdever.com) or call me (716.222.0237) to provide me with the details of what you’ve got to offer and confirm my availability.

How can I follow along on your adventures this year?

1. Compiled content will be released in blog posts – so subscribe to my RSS feed.
2. There’s always @clarkdever on twitter (this is the most unfiltered feed).
3. I’ll be announcing my talks, travel dates, and photos through my fan page on facebook.
4. I’ll be releasing images through my flickr account.
5. I’ll be releasing video through my youtube account.

We don’t have an ASMP Chapter, but we’re photographers interested in Social Media

Cool with me, you should start an ASMP Chapter; but if you have a Meetup Group, PPA Chapter, NPA Chapter, etc – I’d still be happy to talk to you if you can meet the requirements above.

I’m not a photographer, but my professional group would love to have you talk.

That’s fine, I’m more than happy to talk to other business/regional groups – the practices I teach work for any small business.  You just have to follow my conditions above, but you can substitute #5 for splitting the profits on the talk with me.  Call me to iron out the details – (716) 222-0237

I don’t care about learning social media, I just want to hear about your first trip!

Fine, I can talk to you and your friends for an hour retelling the real antics of  my first debaucherous mission around the US.  Get me a projector, buy me some beer, and plan a party.  I’ll bring a laptop full of images and enough drunken hilarity to make it worth your time.  Just name the city and the date, bonus points if you find a good photographer to come shoot with me during the day, super bonus points if you are a good photographer and we party at your studio… with models.   E-mail Me (clark@clarkdever.com) or call me (716.222.0237) to provide me with the details of what you’ve got to offer and confirm my availability.

Twelve Hours in a City Season 1 Recap from nathan m peracciny on Vimeo.

That’s it for right now… stay tuned for more details soon!

Check out my buddy Greg’s project 30 Days on jetBlue – I will be donating some of my proceeds to his parents school in Zambia. Check out his family’s not-for-profit Zambia Tomorrow and donate now.