On this evening Rob Campbell of Lenzr Corp, and David Shephard of Jib.ca will have gathered together some of the brightest thinkers and builders in Toronto’s internet technology community to share their thoughts and ideas on ‘social rank’ and how it affects search results. This is what we mean by ‘search and social rank’, how social media is now skewing search engine results, and vice versa.

Guest speakers include Joey DeVilla (the Accordian Guy) from Shopify.com, Geoff Whitlock of Click Clip Deals. Craig Backman the president of McLellan Group , Benjamin Allison, myself and one more speaker, To Be Determined . You can see all their faces and read their biographies and subject lines on the Search and Social Rank Symposium on Jib’s website.

At 6pm the doors will open and early attendees will commence networking, mingling about and snacking on food and ideas. Sandwiches and one glass of beer or wine is available with the price of admission. There will be wireless internet available – I will post the wifi password at the event.

At 7pm everyone will take their seats and I will introduce the evening and the first speaker. This is a night of ideas, and these people are not salesmen, not tonight. They are scientists pioneering software and web tools designed to help improve their users’ social media marketing and search engine optimization. The best tools do both, at the same time. Joey is no doubt going to talk about how to get social with an e-store, and Geoff will discuss the rise of the social coupon.

The Google Search Algorithm is the Arbiter of Relevance in Search and Social Rank

Its a bit like natural selection, and very much like Mother Nature herself, the Google search algorithm is always evolving. The smart company, reacting to the market, is always changing its search algorithm by weighing different links heavier or lighter, and adding or subtracting values in an effort to remedy black hat SEO practices and return more accurate search results to users. And it works – I have always found Google to be the best at delivering high quality results. THIS IS THE AGE OF EARNED MEDIA: It seems to me, now more than ever, that to be listed on page one of any search engine, our clients must genuinely deserve to be there. I like to tell people that we are fooling Google, by doing exactly what they want.

Today our clients need to build better destinations, and grow content fields to ‘earn’ natural rankings as one of the top ten portals on page one. Many URLs do this by serving up good information for free, in the hopes that someone will be impressed and return to buy their product or service. Much like the apple tree gives away its fruit to spread its seeds, I ask clients, “what can people take away from your site and digest? What subjects are you the expert on? How can we plant your idea seeds in other peoples’ brains?’

Where search engine optimization meets social media marketing there’s a round table.

A symposium is a meeting of equals and a general sharing of ideas. There is no keynote speaker and nobody will dominate more than twenty minutes of the occasion at one time. Also, I have asked that Archeo restaurant be set up with a central round table – not a bunch of round tables, but rather a central horseshoe wherein 36 people can comfortably sit facing each other around the central speaker. Other attendees can sit behind this arrangement. This will facilitate true round table discussions, like a company boardroom, the dieas can be weighed and analyzed, clarified and expanded upon by enthusiasts – plus it gives everyone at the table room for their notepads, laptops and food and drink. Deb Lewis of Toronto City Events is organizing the symposium. Deborah was recently profiled on Canada Blog friends.

We’ll be promoting the event on Dingo – so get Dingo to see what happens there.
On Twitter we’ll be out tweeting updates and promoting the event #ssrs12 .

One of the best parts of my job as Managing Director of Lenzr Corp is walking to work in the morning through the Distillery Historic District in Toronto. Located at 55 Mill Street, south east of Front and Parliament, this is one of the oldest parts of the city and was originally the busy lakefront up until the 1870s. I used to work as a grip in the film business, and I’d get called to shoot movies here in the 1990s, which was before it was restored to its present glory.  Today the compound is still filled with cinematic old buildings and beautiful cobblestone streets, but also accommodates a thriving community of artists and theatre workshops, cafes, galleries, stores and specialty markets. The area has been preserved as much as possible to accommodate museum quality historic artifacts and tell the life story of a large Canadian distillery, Gooderham and Worts 1842 - 1921. These people made the rye whiskey that was drank all across the Canadian and American West.

Its always interesting to me to see the work that’s involved in creating a live event. The Toronto Christmas Market is a massive spectacle that will attract a quarter of a million people to the Distillery venue over the next sixteen days. Everyone is hoping for snow.

In this picture you can see a suction pump machine is draining the marshy land underneath the new clock tower. Getting a firm foundation in The Distillery is difficult because the water table is high.

Working in combination with the event planners and Distillery District staff, I am proud to announce that Lenzr.com was chosen to power the Official Toronto Christmas Market Photo Contest which collects and displays images right on the Toronto Christmas Market website.

This world class event runs from Dec 2nd to December 18th, 2011- the photo contest runs until Jan 1st. Voting begins on the 15th and ends on Jan 25th. The sponsor is the sole judge.

The photo challenge has been created to secure the most beautiful picture(s) taken at the event - the Distillery District is keen to show the best snaps that capture the true essence of this festive assembly.

The winning photo will almost definitely be used in the 2012 Toronto Christmas Market advertising campaign, both on the website and in print, published in Distilled Magazine with proper photo credit.  Because there’s nothing worse than winning a big prize and then finding your shot expropriated and used everywhere without any consideration.

There are three prizes:

Winner will receive a $250.00 cash prize,
2nd place will receive a $250.00 restaurant gift certificate
3rd place will receive a $100.00 restaurant gift certificate.

Also on Lenzr, House For Renovation by Toronto Mortgage Broker

Lenzr members have been very busy in the last month uploading sensational snaps of derelict houses and barns and buildings that could really use either a wrecking ball or the womanly touch of a property developer who would preserve them. House for Renovation is making history by collecting over a hundred images of historic properties. This is a photo preserve to stand the test of time. Renovation properties are a hot subject on cable television right now, but they have always been of interest to photographers. Old houses and shacks are storytfull scenery with people in the foreground, or wonderful subjects all by themselves. The prize is an Apple iPad2 courtesy of a successful Toronto mortgage broker with a great team located in the High Park area of the city. These guys are very experienced in the local Toronto mortgages, and international US mortgages, commercial mortgages and residential real estate mortgages.

Electronic Engineering Photo Contest on Lenzr for Reed Switch Maker

The Electronic Engineering photo contest on Lenzr is sponsored by a reed switch designer and wants to see the actual electronic mechanisms inside of things. The contest page copy leads with a cry to compel members to crack open their clock radios and spill out the circuit board guts. ‘Break into your obsolete electronics and showcase the components. Let’s see dusty old chips and thermostats, fuses, filters and fans - can you tell an amazing story with only microchips?’

The prize is an Apple iPad 2 courtesy of a reed switch component designer that makes and distributes these magnetic marvels to many home electronics producers in Canada and USA.

Raymi the Minx told me about harthfest in a heartfelt mass email. She wrote,

Hey idiots this is how you come to harthfest for FREE tomorrow - get your tickets for your flight on harth air, i’ll be checking you in at the door. Forward this to friends of yours you want to bring with. 8PM 99 Sudbury See ya! http://harthfest.com

Harthfest was the AndroidTO After Party

2 ROOMS - 2 EXPERIENCES, both of them kinda chilly

LIVE PERFORMANCES

COLORFUL EXHIBITS were arranged about the room behind a boxing ring,

The StickerYou Make-Your-Own-Sticker Photo Booth
Roller Derby champions THE ROLLERGETTES in-person
The art of Jimmy Chiale
The Eightshit social media profile pic service and much, much more.

Raymi the Minx, harthfest, her on stage antics  complimented Sean Ward harthfest opening for ANDY MILONAKIS, a rap artist with MTV accreditation. Sean and Raymi shared the stage with him.

Andy Milonakis is no stranger to new media; he broke into show business through a series of Internet shorts. His rap was passionate, but to me it wasn’t very interesting because the words were incomprehensible in that venue.

The stage, which was a boxing ring, was bouncing so much it threatened to break, and the promise of that imminent disaster kept me watching for another 20 minutes, but then I had to leave for the quieter and slightly warmer climate of the second room.

Michael Nus was there and I see today he wrote a comprehensive account, AndroidTO and Harthfest

Casie Stewart were there, and she wrote about it too, Canada’s Android Conference, AndroidTO.  And many other people I didn’t know, and have yet to follow me on Twitter @roberrific

It was indeed a Harthfest and I hope they do it again in a more  acoustically suitable venue next year. Here are my pictures of the evening.

There is a new page on the Lenzr Blog entitled, How To Get Votes? that explains the art and science of soliciting votes and earning a Top Ten ranking (to be considered by Judges as winner for prizes and permanent honour with blog links to user profile page).

Not content with simply posting my thoughts on the subject, and reflecting on years of experience, I have placed a thread in the Lenzr discussion forum. How To Get Votes? in the Lenzr Forum to ask the membership for their ideas. (The Promote section of the Lenzr Forum is incidentally one place where you can get votes), Referrals and ‘Vote Exchanges” are allowed, and encouraged when they are communicated and acted upon in a manner that perpetuates a germ of the sponsor’s story.

Carolyn Wilman, Contest Queen and Lenzr Judge

Carolyn Wilman has volunteered to be one of eight current Lenzr Judges! The Contest Queen is a veteran contest media blogger with a dedicated following of frugal moms and many more semi-professional contesters, some of which are photographers of considerable ability. She writes From The Contest Queen which is a weekly round-up of best prizes, clever challenges, international conventions and thoughtful profiles of other successful sweepers. Last week she wrote about Lenzr photo contests in a piece entitled Get Clicking with Lenzr that set the record straight regarding seven contests on the index in October 2011. She’s a pal.

There’s a lot of noise in contest media, because there are so many competitions to choose from, and so people need to be able to reference a veteran authority like Carolyn Wilman; here’s a lady with a passion for these web attractions, and she has the competitive constitution necessary to compare the data and decide which contests are worth entering.  You can follow her on Twiter @ContestQueen .  Carolyn is a regular on morning TV news programs, including Canada AM on CTV; she was cast in a TLC reality TV show about online contesting in the summer of 2011 but that project hasn’t won any broadcast windows yet.

Lenzr Celebrates The Bread Maker’s Art with Our Daily Bread Photo Contest

This online event is sponsored by a food scientist with a bread baking company that has just launched an organic ingredients estore to help folks find good stuff that they can use in their kitchens. Home baked bread is the best food in the world. The challenge asks members to submit foodie shots of bread, either by itself or alongside meals. The Prize is a fancy Breadman Breadmaker, the perfect electric rig for making bread and it comes with a baker’s manual book in which you can glean the basics and then perhaps substitute your own components into the bread recipes.

Will you also be handcrafting your own clever Halloween costume this year?

Making a homemade Halloween costume can actually improve your reputation as a friend or neighbour.  Homemade Halloween Costumes is an online event designed to celebrate the best achievements, that would otherwise be forgotten. This is a sixty day web challenge. The Prize is $250 worth of cash or candy that comes courtesy of Jib Strategic Social Media Contests and if you visit this page you can see how this boutique web marketing company is getting clever with their own unique blend of contest media storytelling and social marketing for urban professionals. Upload your pictures to the index now, and right up until November 25th, 2011. It’s recommended that you promote your pictures when voting begins Nov 15, 2011 to get into the Top Ten grouping.

Do you have any pictures taken inside warehouses?

A leading information technology company that develops material handling software for cost efficient inventory management systems seeks specific images to accompany informative text on their new website.

Warehouse Stockpiles asks for images of exterior holding pens and interior warehouses full of raw materials or finished goods. The challenge here is to get good pictures for a technical assignment beyond the contest. Getting pictures of industry is tough. This match demonstrates how manufacturing companies can use Lenzr to crowd-source images that have more character and authenticity than stock shots. The warehouse data management software developer shows extensive thought leadership in raw materials handling systems, and production planning software that can better track expenses, and calculate wasted time and stock.

Top Ten Limiting Script

Lenzr is adding limiting scripts to prevent the usual chorus of semi-professional contest photographers from dominating the Top Ten photo galleries in every contest. Its not their fault - they jut happen to be more social and have more ‘networks’ that will engage and help them .

On Oct 22nd 2011 the Lenzr admin (Rob Campbell) made the decision to manually remove multiple images that are held by the same members. You can read more about this development and about the development and installation of a manual limiting software switch in the Site Suggestions category of the Lenzr discussion forum.

Here I am helping my brothers harvest their honey crop. The harvest is late this year, and beeing out in a ‘yard-of-bees’ on a chilly September morning isn’t much fun - the bees were miserable!

But the mist covered scenery is breathtaking.

I love this particular beeyard because its centered in an old apple orchard. Its a trip back in time to when local farmers planted fruit trees and made their own home cooked pies and preserves. Now here in a very old field, far from any major highway there are a half dozen hundred year old trees and their children, and their forgotten fruit lies all around the perimeter of the apiary enclosure.

This place would be excellent cow pasture, or a natural habitat for wild deer if it wasn’t for the beehives and an eight volt solar powered fencer that keeps the critters away. It keeps the animals away from bushels of healthy apples too, and that’s a shame.

The second best thing to happen in the month of September was meeting Nora Camps of Duo.ca

Nora Camps of Duo Strategy and Design is a business storyteller with a great track record, and a website full of referrals from well known clients.

Nora taught me lots of little things in our very first meeting. She introduced me to High Fidelity Storytelling and enlightened me on how charitable Foundations and Trusts do business, and how she tries to do good work for the most deserving clients;

she seeks out projects with green mandates, and especially those organizations that work to create real change. She is overwhelmingly positive.

Nora has a wonderful  storytelling process and it starts with listening…

Building your Brand Story

I am honoured to be working with Nora and Duo Strategy and Design

We’re running a Lenzr photo contest for Duo called Canadian Harvest, wherein we’re asking folks to upload pictures of themselves, friends or neighbours outdoors harvesting Nature’s bounty.

TEXT UNDER IMAGES!

Here is a look at the future of Lenzr storytelling - to me this is a very exciting. Text under the pictures adds volumes to the story.

Websites that collect high quality user submitted content can be used to help businesses investigate and even illustrate their consumer’s perception of a subject; they collect ideas and images for the sponsor’s own brand stories.  By selecting a theme that’s somehow related to their business, the sponsor makes mosaics with other people’s pictures and anecdotes; Lenzr lets companies make powerful myths to serve their own brand establishment.

A web 2.0 storytelling tool, you can see all the pictures in Canadian Harvest, Photo Storytelling on Duo.ca as Nora is testing the innovation on her own site - the RSS feed for this contest will someday be a fully developed API that allows real participation on the client’s website.

The photo above is all that i have left of an interesting experiment that I captured - for two days the feed to Nora’s site from Lenzr had the 140 character descriptive text displaying under each uploaded images, and it revolutionized the entire storytelling experience. This is how to tell stories! Images and text melt together into a beautiful rich media collage - this is how I want the Lenzr Archives to display all previous contests.

Saturday August 27 will see a great many blog friends and social media marketers gather behind CSI in the parking lot south of Honest Eds at Bloor St and Bathurst in Toronto.

Word11 has been conceived as a 24hr blog media event, and hopes to be the first in a long series of annual 24hr events. It emerged from a minor kerfuffle between Cg6 and WordCamp, the details of which remain unclear.  Some refunds were issued and are still the subject of excellent blog discussions and tweets.

The event was preceded by something called Prefix which took us all by surprise.

I ask you… Will WORD11 be the first occurrence of an annual social media festival? or will this be the only one? Whatever the case I’m sure we’ll make memories, and I reckon it will be rather historic day and night and day again.

I intend to use this opportunity as a speaker, on stage at 3pm on Saturday afternoon, to share my vision of the emerging online economy of ’social relevance’ and how its become much more than just SEO link building (although incoming links are still the base currency in the economy of relevance).   I’ll define the role of the Relevance Producer and how Lenzr photo contests can help build up the ’social capital’ of business URLs very effectively, and very affordably, in a remarkably short period of time.

STORY FUNNELS TO BUCKSTOPS

I see stories everywhere. The elements of story are in everything we do; they are core to our existence because  human brains need stories like human bodies need food.  People who have boring jobs generally watch a lot of television after work because they need, enjoy and have become addicted to those stories. If they didn’t have that outlet they’d fill the taverns and converse with each other and about each other or listen to bards’ songs that do the same. Television is a modern ’story restaurant’ with a 56 channel menu full of drama, comedy and adventure for human brains.

The internet is a story supermarket, but you have to cook the food yourself and interact with others to get the goodness.  The stories come with some assembly required, and are digested in different ways.

This is a golden age for storytellers because never before has it been so easy to affect hundreds, thousands or even millions of people.  But we have to tell the stories differently. The best relevance producers engineer an ‘orchestra of participation’ around their brand idea both inside and outside their companies.

Here at Lenzr we like to fragment each corporate message into several mediums and compel participants to move from one platform to another, putting the story together in their own heads -that’s a powerful branding exercise. True social media is the mad clicking between blogs, and discussion forum threads, viewing pictures and responding to tweets where # of followers doesn’t matter, and search engine result pages are part of the experience.  Good stories compel people to keep clicking, looking for more and more juicy little details.

Story Funnel to Buckstops is how we tell stories at Lenzr Corp

Intelligent social media marketers that are ‘in the trenches’ distributing messages on articles, blogs and discussion forums, Facebook and Twitter soon come to realize that it behooves them to execute each campaign in a certain order, with a preordained pattern of digital venues that support and boost the credibility of each other, and bring traffic and other people’s ideas into the mixture. This grows a campaign. At Lenzr we start by taking or securing original pictures, and then by hosting our media on 3rd party photo / video hosting sites; we use Flickr or Fotki or YouTube and post pictures and videos first, because we know we’re going to need these resources to embed into all of our upcoming articles, blog and forum posts.

We start at the top and write great original stories, and then work our way down a long list of To-Do media until we find ourselves at the bottom of the funnel, and there we instigate a switch post and use it to build content that we’ll need to start all over again. Every node has a different language and different social values. Every replication of the story is not a duplication, but rather a different telling from a different perspective of the same message / links.

A good story funnel compounds the relevance created in the original featured media, and magnifies the value of all links back to the client under perfect keyword anchor text.

It also excuses and makes wholesome other links back to the client in other supporting articles blogs and forums that link to the featured story and to the buckstop.

The buckstop is the engine where the ecommerce happens, or where you wrangle more Twitter followers, or Facebook likes or Flickr friends, etc - this is a participation harvesting mechanism. The buckstop of this blog post would be you registering for a ticket to see me speak at Word11.

I’m marketing Lenzr at Word11, and this Smojoe blog post Is the featured story in a story funnel I’m composing to promote that upcoming presentation. I have posted the pictures you see above on Fotki where I have linked to the Word11.com website, and I will bookmark this post on Digg, Delicious, Reddit and Zoomit etc StumbleUpon after I publish and proofread. Next I could truncate this message and leave a quick blog on Young Entrepreneurs, or I could guest blog it, or seek out local social media forums like League of Kickass Business People (is that still around?) or Toronto Forums esp UrbanToronto.ca and of course Facebook and Twitter. This post is made to be linked beside #Word11 #Toronto on Twitter.  Then, and this is the true beauty of live events, while at the conference I could discuss these marketing actions on and off stage with people and learn which parts of this story funnel they encountered / remembered while surfing about trying to decide whether or not to attend.

The Grasscutters, Solar Generator - David Shephard donated a solar powered generator from his eco friendly property maintenance company and earned lots of points with the organizers. TM Mahdi gave him a sponsorship button and some free tickets to the event, and I managed to get Lenzr button linked up as a sponsor too, just for being in the middle of the deal. Truth be told I also helped the Word11 committee secure sponsorship from Absolute party rentals and Its My Potty portable toilet rentals which are long standing friends / clients of Lenzr corp.

This 100th blog post affords me the perfect opportunity to reflect back on my own progress as a freelance writer, blogger, web content producer and thinker / organizer that specializes in helping others find a marketing path in the age of earned media. I taught myself and learned empirically the Smojoe Code of compound link building and ‘how to make keyword sandwiches’.

Readers of every description have watched and read along as Smojoe gave birth to Lenzr and everyone can see what that business is becoming…  This blog is one of the best places to glean rare inside looks at traffic stats and issues. Will that project mature into the world’s best 3rd party photo contest solution?

Looking back on 100 posts I have some favourites. Below are the best ones, most of which still get a half dozen readers a day from Google search. Some are popular because they have curiously searchable keywords and subtitles, some because they have original pictures and some because they are controversial or appear on popular lists somewhere, in every case there’s a different reason.

TOP TEN BLOG POSTS

ZOS Last Tango in Jadac
This was one of the first posts I ever wrote on Smojoe, in June 2008 and it was for a LifeCapture Interactive project wherein they were executing a Bell Globe Media fund for a TV Series called Z.O.S. or Zones Of Safety. Not many people saw the TV show and even fewer people visited the website, but my Smojoe blog post about it has been very successful and I’m still getting visits and people ‘borrowing’ the images, which were mostly screen grabs from the game or interactive experience. It was groundbreaking at the time and there were indeed some chapters of this game that i will never forget. Peter Miskimmin was the producer - he was a friend from film business.

Dumpdiggers Arena Photo Battle Widget
A piece of my web development history that was made to showcase pieces of history as they were uploaded to an antiques and collectibles photo battle competition - Lenzr grew from this attraction. The photo contest website comes from this photo battle game prototype on what used to be Dumpdiggers.com. The side bar widget was similar to the present day Lenzr widget in that it showed the latest upload in three or more contests. You can read more about this photo contest engine evolution in The Story of Lenzr.

Best Case Scenario: Original Content Published Exclusively
This post, dated Nov 2009 represents a shift in my thinking away from article marketing websites and the mass replication of low quality links, toward researching and writing and publishing great original content full of good data and rare information, exclusively. To deliberately avoid all replications and make the content valuable, exclusively on high quality magazines and awesome blogs requires a whole other set of rules - a whole new economy of building relevance through bookmarks and original photography, interviews and getting the scoop for high quality ‘citizen journalism’ - but I give away these lessons in the next post right after this nugget titled, “Actually Sharing Secrets’ which became a category in my blog.

How To Stop Canpages Phonebook Delivery?
Little change has been made to the Yellow Pages or Can Pages phone book distribution model that I am aware of, as there is still an enormous stack of books down by the mailboxes in my building. What will happen to them? I may do a follow-up on this one.

Nestle Pure Life - Greenwashing The Web
I wrote this as a reaction to seeing the television commercial on CityTV wherein the female voice-over narration implies that bottled water is a healthy alternative to pop because ‘we don’t swim in pools of high fructose corn syrup’. On the Nestle Pure Life website they claim that recycling the bottles is a managed solution inherent in all plastic containers, and that their eco-friendly bottle uses less plastic and is therefore an environmentally friendly choice.  It really pisses me off that they can get away with this, as this is simply not true.  And the commercial is still running, and every convenience store, grocery store, hardware store, and office supply store including staples and home depot sells Nestle Pure Life bottled water in ‘eco friendly’ packaging for 2.99 a case

Smojoe Dental Surgery is White Tooth SEO
After visiting my Toronto dentist I wrote a detailed account of the experience of getting porcelain crowns and included YouTube videos and pictures and long blocks of keyword rich text.  I wrote the whole story for Dr Archer so she could put it on her website, which she did. This adds to her website as a resource - a handcrafted testimonial by a skilled blogger. Then I promoted the piece on Facebook and Twitter of course, but also in bookmarks and my specialty, niche discussion forums. This blog post chronicled the original testimonial and the work I did to promote the piece. Incidentally I always led with the pictures of my teeth - which i still do today. You see the picture up top? Its a hard habit to break.

How Blogging Saved The Beauty Pageant
This blog post bears witness to one of my greatest achievements as an interactive experience engineer. My relationship with the Miss Teen Canada World organization was founded right after speaking at a Deb Lewis event at The Spoke Club in December 2008. That cold Tuesday night I met the warm and friendly marketing people behind the 2009 Search for Miss Teen Canada World. At that time, this was a ‘beauty pageant’ funded entirely by participant’s entry fees and had no connections to modeling or photography schemes or any sponsors (or any after market sales beyond selling a DVD to the parents). Smojoe built a blog network for this organization - first it was on the OnSugar Blog Platform, a free blogging platform hosted in California, but now we have a permanent network of self hosted blogs all bearing the Miss Teen Regions of Canada. This year Lenzr Corp registered and skinned 75 WordPress blogs and already the Miss Teen Canada - World Blog Network is a very powerful marketing tool perfectly targeted to a youth demographic. Its a massive new venue for storytelling, and captures a vast amount of user generated content.

What is a freelance social relevance producer?

The idea came to me that community managers are often asked to do way too much because their role remains undefined.The relevance producer is a new vocation. The online social relevance producer is the company storyteller that sets policy and executes keyword strategy. He or she composes stories as ‘hot scripts’ which are txt docs that are in html or pre-fabricated bits of BB code that contain pictures, and links as well crafted incentives. They’re cut and pasted from the back end of the relevance producer’s own favourite blogs and discussion forums. Community managers spread the relevance producer’s messages as they adapt the core hotscript to fit their own blogs and forums in their own niches and communities.

How to tell Business Stories with Photo Contests

This will be my specialty for the next few years - how to tell business stories with Lenzr photo contests and build visual databases and dominate search engines will be my presentation. How to make great hooks that affect markets will be my case studies. I will consult with anyone telling stories in the form of interactive web challenges esp photo contests - are you thinking about doing a photo contest? Talk to me. I know how to use photo contest media to build ’social capital’ in the form of incoming links and increased reputation.

The Google search algorithm is the primary arbiter of relevance in the post information age.

Traditional Search Engine Optimization companies and veteran web developers have not kept abreast of Google’s latest changes to their search math which now favours a great deal more ‘social metrics’ and ‘usability’ over sheer volume of incoming links – its quality over quantity in the age of earned media.

Lenzr has pioneered a new way to tell stories that builds social capital in the form of user generated content on a particular theme photography challenge.

Clients should know that less than ten percent of the media appears on the Lenzr website, while more than 90% of the work is done off page when a team of skilled social media marketers communicates news of the prize, and interactive challenge to the blogosphere in handcrafted rich media articles, blogs and discussion forum posts, Facebook and Twitter updates.

Most North American SEO companies still buy incoming links for their clients from South Asian companies in the form of directory listings. These same SEO companies cannot fathom how to cheaply and efficiently buy ‘social links’ from websites that people actually use – because Google is very smart and they know what links and sites people actually use.  They know Lenzr is well used. Although Lenzr is still an infant with only 5000 unique visitors a month, the website itself has a very high usability (39% bounce rate, average visit 4 minutes, 9 pages viewed). The links we plant to and from our photo contest arena are couched in the natural relevance of web storytelling. The links we plant to sponsors share that relevance and high usability message space. So for example a heads-up blog post about a cool new Lenzr photo contest is a relevant message for photographers, art lovers, and contest media opportunists alike. And so is the knowledge that a particular business URL sponsored the prize. Its part of the story.

That’s the base - its our job as storytellers to create imaginative and wildly successful challenges like A Counting Exercise photo contest on Lenzr in June 2011, which attracted over 150 submissions and garnered 1886 votes to decide one winner.  The last two photos are from that contest and featured among the Top Ten picked by the membership (so I’ve used them here in connection with the contest as per the Lenzr Terms of Use).

Lenzr is a serial photo contest website that aims to be the World’s number one choice for providing custom photo contest solutions. It’s a delivery system designed to make user generated photo challenges easy to create and implement on sponsor business websites. The storytelling can occur in the form of buttons, banners, display widgets and even a small API to allow voting. The idea is that anyone’s blog or company website can be dramatically improved *socially* by adding a clever photo contest to the homepage or blog.

Over the last two years, Lenzr has grown a large community of professional photographers and many of them have now uploaded their profile pictures and links. They all enter the contests regularly and chat with each other in their profile pages and in the discussion forum. But we have even more social surprises to unveil in the months to come…

Lenzr is free to join and free to use, and you’re free to win great prizes.

There are no ads either, and we never sell email addresses or any user information. The new photography discussion forum will soon be filled with helpful site-related queries and replies, and of course some unrelated discourse about the art and science of photography and the business of being a freelance photographer.

With this new custom website we hope to be able (someday) to offer a flawless contest delivery system that will be quite unique in the marketplace and offer users more customizable options plus lots of native traffic.
Lenzr does not own any photographers’ images – the terms of service are very specific.  Each participant simply grants Lenzr and the contest sponsors the rights to display their images in connection with the specific web challenge to which the photo was submitted, only. The photos must not be copied and we are working on disabling browser Save Photo feature.  That being said we hope to introduce custom photo licensing software that will incent members to join a cooperating image bank and allow others to license their pictures.

The new website launched June 1 at Lenzr.com and it has been a rather bumpy start, but nothing more onerous than our IT solution manager Will Webb of Innate Media Group predicted.  The main complaint has been CMS issues – everyone is thrilled with how well the contests look on the front end.

Last month four sponsors broke the ice on the new platform. A Toronto IT staff solutions firm launched Best Office Staff Party which is probably the least successful so far, with only about twenty five photos uploaded. An Ottawa roofing company sponsored Construction Sights because the same firm does vinyl siding and windows and doors. There have been almost sixty submissions so far in that match. Shafts of Sunlight is presented on behalf of a sunrooms installer in Cambridge Ontario, and although there are lots of entries, very few  actually have a good tangible shaft; most are just lens flares.

The number one photo contest right now in terms of entries will probably become the most successful challenge ever launched on Lenzr. When last I checked the A Counting Exercise photo contest sponsored by Toronto accountants had 110 pictures uploaded, and there’s still more than fifteen days before the challenge ends. On the 25th of July, after voting ends, the Top Ten images in each match will advance to the Judges for a final decision.

On July 1st long weekend, while I was vacationing at a Muskoka cottage near Bracebridge Ontario, three more photo contests launched. And there have been four Community Contests hosted on the portal since we unveiled the new website on June 1st, 2011.

My sincerest apologies for not updating Lenzr members earlier to announce the winners of the Glorious Colours contest and the What’s In Your Garden photo contest, but I forgot that these were only 30 day challenges – it wasn’t until Saturday July 9th that I took any action to announce the winners, mr_slava and tluvr respectively. The prizes are pretty sweet too, a solar powered radio and an Ames’ lawn buddy.

Saturday July 9th was a very special Registration Day for at least seventy five participants in the 2011 Search for Miss Teen Canada – World, as one by one teen girls age 14-18 from all across Canada checked their luggage into the sponsor hotel in downtown Toronto to start their week long adventure. One at a time they met each other in the lobby and corridors the massive historic hotel complex at the base of the city.

In the antechamber of one of the enormous ballrooms, they found Michelle Weswaldi and lined up there to present her with their head shots, and CDs filled with pictures, videos and audio that they recorded at home in which they demonstrate their acting, singing and special skills for the upcoming talent show.  After a brief question and answer with the Pageant Director they went and joined the others on the carpet of the large empty room.

There’s a nervous energy in the place as the teenagers meet each other in person for the first time. When I arrived they were sitting on the floor in a huge  75 bodies-wide circle, telling stories about their trip getting here, and their plans for the rest of the summer. But in the back of their minds they must be thinking that their plans could change… One of them will be crowned 2011 Miss Teen Canada - World and will be flying south to Houston Texas where she will represent all of Canada in a quest to be 2011 Miss Teen World. Once crowned 2011 Miss Teen Canada – World, that young person’s life will be changed forever as they’ll be required to fly all over North America meeting local dignitaries and celebrities presiding over regional pageants.

As the 2011 Social Media Director I spoke to the assembly for about twenty minutes, and we discussed the brand new Miss Teen Canada Blog Network and the difficulties that some of them were having with the interface. I explained WYSIWYG editors and cautioned that what you see in the backend is sometimes not what you get in the post, and it can be very frustrating.  I was keen to council them NOT to cut and paste Word docs directly into the Visual editor of their WordPress blogs, but rather paste it into the html editor first, and even better is to paste into notepad or a text file editor to ‘sterilize’ the text before using the html editor to insert pictures and links.

We talked about the sidebar widgets and whether anyone had ever clicked through the ads. The all voiced their opinion that the TWIG ad at the bottom the screen should be removed. We talked about making incentives for corporations to pay them in iTunes credits, or Paypal to review beauty products or movies or TV shows.

I explained just exactly how good blogs can make their authors famous. Each of the contestants in this challenge has already completed three different writing assignments on the blogs. Their 3rd and last assignment asked each blogger to dream up a TV show idea and cast themselves as the star. Then we asked them to pick two companies from among the official MTCW sponsors to fund their concept. They had to explain why these sponsors would be interested in funding their TV pilot and in the act of thinking like a sponsor they see the value they bring

Here’s the Miss Teen Canada Blog Network on Squidoo – this assembly of teen bloggers from all across Canada is really quite a remarkable social media innovation in its own right. Last year, or perhaps it was two years ago now I wrote about how teaching the contestants to blog and linking them into a network could grow this ‘beauty pageant’ to new heights. How the Blog Saved The Beauty Pageant details how this flimsy blog network could be grown year by year into a powerful new broadcast medium.

Each participant’s blog has a video player, and we hope to integrate user generated videos into the system next year, and perhaps even later this fall. We need a better Flickr interface so each participant can post their own pictures. We need custom Facebook plugins so each girl can display her own wall. And finally, most importantly we need a custom RSS feed widget that shows every participant’s post in chronological order – 10 on display at all times, headlines and text beside their avatars, one click and readers are transported to the author’s blog.  It would multiple our readership ten-fold. Already Blogs Canada has expressed an interest in securing the RSS feed from the network. And this is something I could also put in the sidebar of Canada Blog Friends.

The week continues until July 25. There is fun and excitement in store for this

Link to Maram’s post on lushhouse, and Arob12’s post about launching the Miss Teen Canada Blog Network and how Lenzr Corp helped Michelle pitch an improved video net to ad agencies and corporate sponsors.

Here”s a two minute video that I shot in the ballroom on the afternoon of July 9th 2011 in which I asked about fifty of the teens to introduce themselves and their title. Before  I started taping one voice informed me that someone else had tried to do this earlier and had soon run out of memory on their camera card. I feared she was right, so I asked everyone to be quick and we would try and circle the entire assembly of about fifty regional title holders in under two minutes. ..

If you’d like to see the two hour competition this year, you can buy tickets on Ticketmaster for the July 16th main event, the 2011 Search for Miss Teen Canada - World at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre
190 Princes’ Blvd., Cne Grounds, Toronto, ON M6K 3C3. The show starts at 8pm and is approx two hours long, and I believe the tickets are $60 each. Unlike previous years, this time its assigned seating - your ticket has a seat number and that’s where you’ll be sitting.