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Hi!
The Olapic Newsletter will now be bringing you the latest news and ideas to help kickstart your next Olapic gallery! This week’s roundup includes some incredible user pics of Lower Manhattan, a solid example of a weekly photo contest , and some pointers on how to run a successful photo campaign . Made any food-related galleries lately? According to this article, food is fast becoming a major social media driver. In photo-sharing news, Instagram has a cool new trend and its giving us tunnel vision! Next week’s schedule is looking pretty wacky: March 6th is “Frozen Food Day” and March 11th is “Worship of Tools Day.” Get your galleries ready!
Keep sharing,
-The Olapic Team -
Photo Gallery of the Week: Sunshots! Baltimore Sun’s Weekly Photo Contest
If you’re thinking about starting a weekly photo contest for your publication then look no further than The Baltimore Sun. The photos they’ve been receiving are breathtaking. Each week the Baltimore Sun’s photography director, Robert Hamilton, picks a winning photo and an honorable mention, offers a bit of information about the featured photographer who took each photo, and describes why they were chosen as the featured photos. Some of their past contest themes have included: Street Scenes, Portrait, Love, Happiness is…, and many more. Check out their Olapic Galleries for more inspiration. But first, check out a few of these stunners and see if you can guess the themes for them!
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Photo Gallery of the Week: Art Around Us
The online artistic haven, Youmeandcharlie.com, called on readers to submit photos of inspirational art found in unlikely places. The result, an incredible photo gallery showcasing street art from around the world. Just another creative way Olapic is being used to share quality content. Check out the full gallery here. Above are a few of our favorite contributions.
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Olapic Newsletter: Kickstarting Your Campaigns
Howdy,
The Olapic community is continuing to grow as we receive high quality user-submitted photos from followers all over the world! For this week’s newsletter we’re going to talk about promotion and trend tracking.
For every Olapic gallery that you launch, promotion is key to getting the word out. Promoting a new gallery should take place across all of your organization’s social networks (Twitter, FB, Google+, etc.). Nevertheless, keep in mind that sometimes your followers will submit unintended photos. It’s your job to identify and build upon you community trends that arise organically.
For example, when the NY Giants were collecting photos from their fans during the Superbowl they noticed an incredible influx of giants-themed food creations! They quickly ran with the trend and create a gallery called Super Bowl 2012 Food. This new fan-created gallery became one of the most popular galleries on photos.giants.com!
As usual, here are three interesting articles we’ve discovered since the last newsletter. Enjoy!
Newsrooms can buy Facebook friends, but user engagement is not for sale
Great take on the differences between active and one-time-only brand followers. “‘You can still have a lot a likes and not be seeing a lot of impressions…Even though your page shows 100,000 likes, only 10,000 or 20,000 people may be seeing it.’”
Are Photos Losing Meaning and Permanence?
Solid review of our current photo-overload. How ease-of-use (supplied by popular photography applications) presents issues over quality and meaning for serious photographers.
Marc Schiller Reveals The Secrets Of Social Media Marketing
“What brands need to do is to recognize that need [of a fan’s desire to be heard], and to help fulfill that need. The brands that get closest to their customers are the ones that celebrate the creativity, the presence of the audience.”Keep Sharing!
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Photo Gallery of the Week: NY Giants Edition
The weeks leading up to the New York Giant’s phenomenal Superbowl XLVI victory was full of excitement and anticipation. To show their support, Giants fans sent in photos wearing their favorite giants gear from all corners of the globe - from San Francisco, Thailand, Rome, and even Jamaica!
At Olapic HQ, we were amazed by the sheer quality and number of photos that Giants fans sent in before, during, and after the Superbowl. We received a ton of post-Superbowl pics from the Giants celebration day parade in downtown Manhattan that were one of a kind! To see all of the Giants galleries go to photos.giants.com
Superbowl 2012 Good Luck Charms
Even cats and dogs gotta show their support! See more here.
To see more fan’s repping their Giants gear check out the Superbowl 2012 Giants Gear gallery.
Go to the Super Bowl 2012 Food gallery for more tasty Superbowl-inspired creations!
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Instagram: Featured: Mobile Photo Group →
Earlier this year, a group of mobile photographers got together to form the Mobile Photo Group, an international collective of 11 photographers dedicated to promoting their work and presenting mobile photography as an important and evolving form of photography. It just so happens that some…
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Football isn’t just about the game. There are so many things that go on around it like fan clubs, tailgating, and traveling to road games. So this is obviously something people get really excited about and a way to get them involved creatively on a more personal level.
– Dave Lang, Baltimore Ravens’ digital media manager -
Fan Reactions! An Awesome Weekend @Olapic HQ!
Olapic HQ is still buzzing with all of the excitement from over the weekend! Saturday we were featured on Mashable and Sunday our favorite team in the NFL, the New York Giants, experienced the “Olapic Effect” (receiving hundreds of photos on their site before, during and after the game). Winning the Superbowl was icing on the cake!
Here are a few of our favorite fan photos and responses (after getting their photos published on the NY Giants website). Thanks to all who submitted! We loved seeing Giants fans show their pride, support, and creativity! Enjoy :)HOLY SHIT THE @Giants WEBSITE PUBLISHED MY PICTURE. IM LITERALLY CRYING RIGHT NOW twitter.com/aidanielle/sta…
— Aidan (@aidanielle) February 5, 2012This is the best birthday ever on the @Giants website twitter.com/margeyfish/sta…
— meggie fisher (@margeyfish) February 4, 2012Check out more Superbowl 2012 Food here
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3 Ways Social Media is Transforming the Superbowl Experience
If you’re lucky enough to be watching the game from within the stadium next Sunday, then count yourself as one of the lucky ones. Superbowl 2012 is expected to have one of the “five smallest” attendances ever recorded with a total seating capacity of 68,000 [indystar]. What will this mean? With an estimated 100 million plus television viewers tuning in, and game day commercials designed to engage fans online, Superbowl-related social media activity is going to be supercharged on an unprecedented level. Here’s the rundown on what to expect…
Hint: Insane fan photos, talking bears, and a one-of-a-kind NFL-backed “Social Media Command Center.”
USER GENERATED CONTENT
While players won’t be able to tweet from the sidelines this Sunday, that wont stop fans from sharing live, in-game content over Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You’ll be sure to see fresh new perspectives covering all aspects of the game such as photos and videos of: fan traditions and superstitions, team-inspired food, fans showing their pride, and on-field plays as they happen.
NY Giants Olapic Gallery - Giants fans can Tweet photos to @Giants and upload photos and videos from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. They’ll all show up on photos.giants.com
ADVERTISERS JUMPING ON THE SOCIAL BANDWAGON
This year, advertisers are using commercials as jumping off points to start extended conversations - on a variety of social media networks - that will take place long after the game has concluded. Top consumer brands have already begun rolling out teasers trailers and hints at their Superbowl commercial surprise. This month-long narrative translates into more people getting more excited and sharing their favorite commercials with one another online. What to watch out for…
The Coca-Cola Polar Bears - On Sunday the Coca-Cola Polar bears will be coming alive! Complete with a live video feed of the bears watching the game and responding to Twitter and Facebook questions.
SOCIAL MEDIA COMMAND CENTER
Need help finding a parking spot or bar to watch the game in downtown Indianapolis? Have no fear! A “Social Media Command Center,” run by the marketing agency Raidious, has been set up near the stadium to provide:
[a] range of info to help both visitors and locals navigate the scene, including traffic, parking, events, where to eat, which streets are closed and more. They’ll also answer question on Twitter and Facebook through the Super Bowl 2012′s main accounts (blog.indystar.com).
Raidious agents will be monitoring and responding to Twitter and Facebook feeds for 15 hours on Gameday. Remember: If you’ve had a few too many and find yourself stumbling around downtown searching for a cab, just tweet it to the command center!
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How to embrace User Generated Content without pissing off photo-journalists, a lesson from CNN’s iReport
iReport, CNN’s citizen-journalist-social-network, was officially launched in August of 2006. The service allows anyone to upload report-worthy content to CNN’s website. Recently, the CNN Press Room announced an important milestone for the platform: there are now more than one million registered iReporters worldwide. And if that doesn’t make any of you small, independent local news reporters shake in your knee-high rain boots - get this. Last year, CNN held the first “iReport Awards.” Award categories included, among others: Breaking News, Personal Story, Compelling Imagery, Commentary, and interestingly, something called “Spirit Honorees.” Spirit Honorees (five were chosen) are iReporters “who have distinguished themselves for their positive attitude, [and] willingness to try new things [ireport.cnn.com].” Whats more, once a month CNN International airs a half-hour TV program hosted by Errol Barnett. The show highlights the most newsworthy iReport and citizen journalism reports on the Internet.
CRITICISMMost of iReport’s criticism falls into two camps that I’ll call the “no pay” camp and the “job cuts” camp. The “no pay” side states its unfair for corporate news networks to not pay iReporters who help make top headline news. Especially, when the content supplied by iReporters becomes instantly sharable anywhere on the web once its handed over to CNN. Think this argument sounds eerily like the recent lawsuit filed by upset blogger Jonathan Tasini regarding his unpaid blog contributions on Huffingtonpost.com? It is. And at the moment, Arianna doesn’t appear to be budging on her no-pay-rule for the site’s army of bloggers.On the other hand, the “job cuts” side says that quality, hardworking journalists are being displaced by iReporters. Jakob Schiller, over at Wired starkly describes a recent corporate squabble at CNN. “CNN recently laid off at least 50 staff, including several photojournalists, in favor of affiliate contributions and [you guessed it] iReport.” The news, if you’re a struggling photo-journalist, appears to be grim.
THE GOOD SIDE
Despite all of the backlash coming in from angry commenters and confused photo-journalists now out of work, iReport does have one significant redeeming quality: iReports (user-generated content in general for that matter) helps focus attention and bring media coverage to outlying, seemingly non-newsworthy events that have traditionally been ignored by mainstream media outlets. Take, for instance, the media standoff between Occupy Wall Street protesters and the major news networks in 2011. Protesters, enraged by the movement’s limited media coverage, sent in thousands of photos and videos from Twitter and Facebook demanding to be heard. Like iReport, Olapic, a photo-crowdsourcing platform, allows any brand or publisher - that isn’t CNN - the ability to collect photos and videos from their users. Olapic was used heavily during the Occupy Wall Street movement here in NYC. See for yourself by checking out the Olapic-powered uPhoto section of the New York Daily News.The iReport team over at CNN recognized this themselves when, earlier this month, they began receiving a tremendous amount of content coming in from protests taking place in Nigeria. Just yesterday, Craig Silverman, a journalist at Poynter wrote, “The result was increased coverage on CNN properties featuring the material submitted by a range of Nigerian citizens and freelancers.” The Nigerians demanded that the world know what was happening in their streets and, through iReport contributions, their voices were heard.
WHERE WE GO FROM HERE
Naturally, after reading all of this, I was as curious as you probably are to see how all of this “iReporting” business works from the user-side.
Ok, I’m on CNN’s iReport page. In the top right corner there’s an upload button that allows me to submit “My Story,” add my location, and attach any video, photos, or audio files.
Back to the main iReport page. There are lots of large, high-quality photos with headline titles above each photo. The featured piece at the top reads, “‘At Last’ is our song: Thank you, Etta James.”
Clicking on this last piece leads you to an article written by Rachel Rodriguez in the entertainment section of the site. Under the title, to the left of her name is written, “This story started on CNN iReport.”
Interesting. The article is written by Rodriguez but grew from the germs of multiple coalesced iReports (all relating to the recent death of Etta James of course). This brings me back to something Silverman said earlier,It’s common for an iReport producer to ask questions about more than just the material that was submitted. In this sense, an iReporter is a hybrid reporter/source. The material they send is treated as reporting, but their personal experience and knowledge makes them an important source of additional information and context [Poynter].
Whether or not major news media agencies will figure out ways to reward their contributors with real money - instead of virtual medals and badges - will be seen in the coming months/years. Nevertheless, I can’t help but ask myself: Is this the future of large-scale corporate journalism? If it is then it appears that the journalist of the future won’t be the idealized daring reporter hitting the streets armed with just a camera and a notepad.Instead, next year’s journalist is likely to be of the type we’re seeing more and more of everyday. That guy you see sitting alone, in front of his computer, on the x-teenth floor of some New York high rise, synthesizing a steady stream of user-submitted content coming in from all over the world.
Power to the people.3 months ago / 0 notes / Source:
