Communication -
Digital Style
Digital Style
Advance Notes: For some photo researchers, the Internet mountain is beginning to flatten out. The language is starting to translate into time-saving advantages and productivity. But for others who still cling to their quill pens and
Where's this all going? Hold onto your hat, you are barreling down the digital technology highway. You may not recognize all the signposts and the landscape. It may make you feel uneasy to be traveling down a road that winds off into a distant unknown. You may feel like you're in the fast lane and can't slow down.
Change is not easy to accept. But keep in mind you can pick and choose options that can make these changes acceptable and comfortable for the way you want to run your photo research business.
We look around and we see, in all quarters of our daily life, that the digital age has come on strong. Embedded chips, barcodes, lasers - they all make things better and quicker, saving time and space in our workplace.
They work while we're sleeping; they remind us of important dates in our lives; they send us warnings when our machinery is about to fail; they even send a clarion call to other machines to help out when the load gets too heavy.
And we ain't seen nothin' yet!
As photo researchers, because digital images are play an integral part in our work day, we get the impression that this whole digital revolution is just for us. Actually, we are only a tiny part of the revolution.
The digital revolution is about communication.
If you rode a bicycle to work, it would probably take you an hour longer to get there, and an hour longer to get home. If everyone rode his or her bike to work, it would seem the natural thing to do. You would not miss the two hours out of the day. But that would be two hours each day you wouldn't be with your family, friends, or involved in your own personal pursuits.
Like those two hours you could lose each day if you rode your bike to work, we can lose two or more business hours each day if we continue using old style methods of communication. In today's world of rapid technological advances, the means we use to communicate with our business contacts directly affects our success or failure.
We live in an accelerated communications society. As a photo researcher, yes, it's certainly possible to conduct your business using the familiar methods (postal mail, telephone) of the last century. And it's possible to drive down a superhighway in a 1982 Dodge Rambler. You might have some moments of glory keeping up with the flow of traffic for a brief spell, but eventually the ol' clunker will falter.
Fax, email, instant messaging, podcasting, electronic delivery and retrieval, are no longer new methods of communicating. They are established tools that enable you to obtain and deliver your target photo requests more quickly and dependably, and communicate with your clients and photo sources with more ease and efficiency, than
There are learning curves involved when jumping in to implement these methods to communicate. We're bound to make mistakes. But we all benefit by forging new working methods to eliminate wasted time. Extra time is a gift these days. And only wise use of our saved time will bring us rewards.
I'm reminded of the farmer down the road from us who bought a riding lawn mower so he could save time cutting the grass in his front lawn. It cut more than half the time off his usual push mower chore. But he decided he could now cut the back lawn and the orchard. That added twice the time to his original grass-cutting schedule.
Economy of time has come upon us quietly in many ways. It seems like only yesterday that we were missing important business and family phone calls because no voice mail existed. Or that we had to pull into a rest stop to find a pay phone to make an urgent call home.
These quiet improvements and the many more to come make the single individual just as muscular in the business world as the corporate manager of yesterday's way of doing business. Today's communication tools provide us all with a level playing field.
Rohn Engh, veteran stock photographer and best-selling author of "Sell & ReSell Your Photos" and "sellphotos.com," has helped scores of photographers launch their careers. For access to great information on making money from pictures you like to take, and to receive this free report: "8 Steps to Becoming a Published Photographer," visit http://www.sellphotos.com
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