Facebook paid $1B for Instagram, a photo app, because FB is a photo sharing website. Flickr and all the rest just missed the boat.

Seth Godin talks about Industrial Photography as a way to express that most customers cannot distinguish between photographers. If the customer cannot differentiate, it is a commodity.

How are commodities chosen? It will come down to one picture the customer likes of yours (if they can find one), or a referral; otherwise it comes down to the price.

To be Annie Leibovitz or Jill Greenberg, you have to extend your art – and make lots of photographs that people hate. So that some will pay a lot for your photos to stand out.

Seth says, “You have to go to the edges.”

Otherwise, you have to re-package the way you sell photos. Like a baby’s first year of photos, as many as you like for $99 a year. Come into the studio with any appointment and we shoot your baby.

Another suggestion is to read this book: Fast Track Photographer.

You are going to have to put on a show. Create scarcity.

Here are two from the 2010 Linchpin event I attended.

Linchpin 1 preso

Linchpin2 preso

Lady Gaga uses many the principles of Seth Godin, including Be Weird!

I leave tomorrow for another full day with Seth Godin in NYC. I was at Seth’s Linchpin day long launch in April of 2010. Here’s hoping for a recharge and a brain stimulation.

I have read most – if not all – of his books, including Wisdom and the Guerrilla Marketing Handbook (that he co-wrote with Jay Conrad Levinson)

I am part of a Six-pack group that will be meeting for coffee at 8 AM at the Cosmo Hotel before heading over to the Tribeca Performing Arts Center for the 9 AM event. And it is an event. There is a digital directory of attendees, there is Q&A, surprises, and a huge collection of the Tribe! I am going to hear from Seth and to meet some other consultants. Hoping to get some gems I can use in my business.

There are a number of resources for mentoring in Tampa Bay:

1. Gazelle Labs
2. Tampa Bay Innovation Center (former STARTEC)
3. SCORE
4. Tampa Bay WAVE
5. USF Small Biz Development Center

I’m certain there are more, but those are the ones that I know. Now go build!

I moved this to a page: http://www.marketingideaguy.com/tampa-bay-vsb-1000/

Tony Francisco says, “10% Idea, 30% Execution/Implementation, then 60% growth/scale/build/improve”

Execution of Ideas

Both Coke and AT&T left the audience with a feeling that became associated with their brand. There is no better branding than that. None.

Today, we have a lot of creative stuff, but very few that leave you with an emotion. One exception is the VW The Force ad by Deutsch that debuted at the Super Bowl.

A couple that come close: TalkTalk is trying with this commercial. Google Chrome did a good job of explaining WHAT you can do with Chrome and the Google Cloud without every mentioning it – which is a huge point! – in this ad. Your prospects and Customers do NOT care about the technology. They only care about what they can do with the tech.

Back to Coke for a minute. Coke did a social experiment in Portugal this year – read about it here. It had nothing to so with selling Coke. It was a human interest story. It was about emotion. I think that’s the key to branding. Feel good, Grab a Coke.

Connect with People, pick up the phone. Voice is better than text because text has no emotion.

According to the NY Times, there are only 1.2 Billion good jobs in the world – and 6.9 Billion people are fighting over them! Ever seen Shift happens?

Education is getting slaughtered in the US – and maybe that is a good thing because free education was set up by Edison and Crew to provide skilled workers for their factory jobs – jobs that have moved overseas. Maybe home schooling, internships and mentoring programs are the way to go. Even with a Chemistry degrees, I didn’t have the skills for a job until I took extra workshops in specific equipment to get certified with marketable skills. The same is true today where a number of jobs did not exist ten years ago — and education certainly won’t fix that.

The key is to be coachable, learn a lot fast, know how to market yourself, communicate, handle the complex — in a nutshell: Be a Linchpin!

Good Luck!