Nieman Journalism Lab |
- How a photographer generated over $100,000 through Facebook
- Bull beware: Truth goggles sniff out suspicious sentences in news
- Google backtracks a bit on charging for its Maps API
| How a photographer generated over $100,000 through Facebook Posted: 22 Nov 2011 11:00 AM PST
When I asked Craig Finlay how Facebook became a major lead generator for his wedding photography business, he interrupted me mid-sentence. “It’s not a major lead generator,” he said. “It’s the entirety of the business.” Finlay’s experience is a neat case study in the power of social marketing. Up until 2010 or so, photography had been mostly a hobby. He was an avid practitioner of urban exploration, a term for photographers who enter — oftentimes illegally — abandoned buildings and urban structures to photograph their interiors. I accompanied Finlay on one of these trips in 2009, sneaking into a small-town Illinois college that had been abandoned for more than a decade. The experience had been surreal, and I stood back as Finlay methodically moved from room to room, snapping pictures of classrooms that seemed to have been evacuated suddenly without any regard for what was left behind. In the basement, we even found a still-lit lightbulb hanging above a few feet of standing water. (“The thing about buildings like these, sometimes they want to sell them so they never disconnect them from the grid,” Finlay said. “It’s just considered vacant of occupants.”)
Finlay worked as a reporter for a small daily paper in Illinois for a year, and in his capacity there he regularly took photographs. For the the most part his hobby remained unpaid — an increasingly expensive ordeal. The notion of making money from it came from his wife Mysi, who had moved with him to Bloomington, Indiana in early 2009. “It grew out of a conversation I had with Mysi while I was just sort of going through and cleaning all of my camera gear,” Finlay recalled. “I had it lying on the table and she just idly wondered how much money I had invested in all this camera gear. I think I had like $5,000 in gear just lying around, and she had the idea that, I don't know, maybe we should start recouping some of those costs.” Settling on shooting weddings was the obvious choice; Finlay was partway through a PhD in information science at the University of Indiana, and weddings wouldn’t conflict with his schedule, as they often occurred on weekends. The first few weddings, however, didn’t generate much revenue. Finlay shot one friend’s wedding for free as a wedding gift; another wedding the couple photographed for only $200. But the latter one they did for a friend of Mysi’s mother, a woman who happened to be a hair dresser. “It turns out if you ever work as a wedding vendor and have an opportunity to do a favor for a hairdresser, always do so,” he said. “It'll pay dividends.” That’s because wedding photography is, in essence, a profession that’s based almost entirely on word-of-mouth. One wedding leads to another, which leads to another. Slowly, the Finlays began to pick up more gigs, though for the most part they were done on the cheap for friends within their social circle. The wedding that changed all that was one the couple shot for a girl, Rebecca, with whom Mysi had gone to high school. “It turned out that all of her bridesmaids were engaged or about to get engaged,” he said. “And so it started this whole chain of Rebecca-referred weddings. And that's how this Facebook thing started, too.” The way Finlay described “this Facebook thing,” it seemed like it had occurred mostly on a whim. He and Mysi had been editing photos from Rebecca’s shoot and decided to throw some of them up onto the Facebook page they had created for their company, Soda Fountain Photography. They tagged the bride and the groom in these initial photos and went back to editing the rest of the batch. But a curious thing happened: When the photos hit the bride and groom’s Facebook walls, friends who had attended the wedding started going in and tagging themselves, thereby publishing the photos to their friends’ walls. In essence, every person who was at the wedding was promoting Soda Fountain Photography’s content — each picture with the company’s watermark at the bottom — to their social graph.
“Almost immediately, our clients were being generated on Facebook,” Finlay recalled. “Because there were the people in the wedding who were getting tagged, and I guess the fortunate thing about wedding photography is that the friends of your clients are the demographic you're always trying to hit. They’re 20-somethings, and they’re either getting engaged or are engaged. So when you take photos and throw them up on Facebook, you tag the bride and the groom, and, yeah, a lot of people looking at the album are family members, but a lot of them are their friends too, and the people who are engaged really interact with your photography in a much deeper way than they could with just a pretty ad in a magazine. They’re clicking through dozens of photos that you immediately throw up on Facebook from the wedding and they don't think they're looking at an advertisement — they just think they're looking at their friends' wedding photos. But every photo has a watermark on it, so every time you look at it it's like it's being imprinted.” Soon, it became the standard operating procedure to throw up a “sneak peek” Facebook album of between 40 and 50 photos after every wedding. If a wedding occurred on a Saturday then they would rush to have the initial photos up on Facebook by Monday at the latest. The number of referrals they received as a result of this strategy was overwhelming. Since that initial lightbulb experience, the couple has done little to change their initial tactics: They publish the sneak peak to the Facebook page, tag the bride and the groom, and let the rest take care of itself. “You open up your email and it says, ‘So and so tagged eight photos of you,’ and you think, ‘those must be the pictures from the wedding.’ So you start going through it and tagging your friends.” In fact, Finlay said, “Facebook is actually reaching out on our behalf to these people and telling them to look at the photo that they've been tagged on — a photo with our watermark — and then they can click around and the option to contact us is right there.” It’s not even December yet and Soda Fountain Photography is already booked for the entire wedding season next year — 25 weekends in all. And because of the rise in demand, their prices have increased. Early on, they were charging less than $800 for a wedding. These days, Finlay said, most of their clients choose a $3,500 package. In a little over a year, the couple has turned a hobby into a six-figure business. And nearly all of those leads were generated through Facebook. Finlay still seemed perplexed at how easy it was. “It’s as if someone designed a program solely for generating photography leads.” |
| Bull beware: Truth goggles sniff out suspicious sentences in news Posted: 22 Nov 2011 08:00 AM PST You’re reading a wrap-up of the Sept. 22 Republican presidential debate when you land on this claim from Rep. Michele Bachmann: “President Obama has the lowest public approval ratings of any president in modern times.” Really? You start googling for evidence. Maybe you scour the blogs or the fact-checking sites. It takes work, all that critical thinking. That’s why Dan Schultz, a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab (and newly named Knight-Mozilla fellow for 2012), is devoting his thesis to automatic bullshit detection. Schultz is building what he calls truth goggles — not actual magical eyewear, alas, but software that flags suspicious claims in news articles and helps readers determine their truthiness. It’s possible because of a novel arrangement: Schultz struck a deal with fact-checker PolitiFact for access to its private APIs. If you had the truth goggles installed and came across Bachmann’s debate claim, the suspicious sentence might be highlighted. You would see right away that the congresswoman’s pants were on fire. And you could explore the data to discover that Bachmann, in fact, wears some of the more flammable pants in politics.
Imagine the possibilities, not just for news consumers but producers. Enhanced spell check for journalists! A suspicious sentence is underlined, offering more factual alternatives. Or maybe Clippy chimes in: “It looks like you’re lying to your readers!” The software could even be extended to email clients to debunk those chain letters from your crazy uncle in Florida. Schultz is careful to clarify: His software is not designed to determine lies from truth on its own. That remains primarily the province of real humans. The software is being designed to detect words and phrases that show up in PolitiFact’s database, relying on PolitiFact’s researchers for the truth-telling. “It’s not just deciding what’s bullshit. It’s deciding what has been judged,” he said. “In other words, it’s picking out things that somebody identified as being potentially dubious.” That means the software might flag a Bachmann claim from another debate — “Our government right now — this is significant — we are spending 40 percent more than what we take in” — and mark it as true. PolitiFact had investigated that claim and the claim checked out. Things get trickier when a claim is not a word-for-word match. For example, the reporter paraphrases: “Our government right now…[is] spending 40 percent more than what we take in,” Bachmann said. Or: Bachman said government spending is 40 percent higher than revenue. It’s not easy for computers to understand the nuances of language the way we do. (Schultz’s adviser, Ethan Zuckerman, is wrestling the same ideas for his more meta-news literacy project, MediaRDI, which would stick nutritional labels on the news.) Schultz’s work explores natural language processing, in which computers learn to talk the way we do. If you’ve ever met Siri, you’ve experienced NLP. Schultz’s colleagues at the Media Lab invented Luminoso, a tool for what the Lab calls “common sense computing.” The Luminoso database is loaded with simple descriptions of things: “Millions and millions of things…Like, ‘Food is eaten’ or ‘Bananas are fruit.’ Stuff like that, where a human knows it, but a computer doesn’t. You’re taking language and turning it into mathematical space. And through that you can find associations that wouldn’t just come out of looking at words as individual items but understanding words as interconnected objects. “Knowing that something has four legs and fur, and knowing that a dog is an animal, a dog has four legs, and a dog has fur, might help you realize that, from a word you’ve never seen before, that it is an animal. So you can build these associations from common sense. Which is how humans, arguably, come to their own conclusions about things.” Open-source versus for-profitSchultz’s truth goggles will be made open-source once finished next year. PolitiFact, of course, is not open-source; it’s a business still trying to figure out how to monetize its data, said editor Bill Adair. “Whether we’re included or not will be a decision we’ll make down the road,” Adair told me. “I think what he’s going to ultimately come up with is going to benefit all fact-checking news organizations, so I think we’ll be happy to be part of that. The goal is to get more accurate journalism in front of more people….My goal is not to get people to stop lying. I still believe strongly that the role of the journalists is to inform democracy and let people make decisions about their leaders.” But even the strongest declaration of truth or falsehood can still spark dissent. It’s beyond the scope of his software, but Schultz’s truth goggles software would be stronger if it could draw from multiple sources. There could be specialty fact-checking sources for physics, or psychology. Or maybe Snopes.com could open up its data with an API. More sources “would help people break away from their filter bubble. They would be exposed to opinions they hadn’t seen before,” Schultz said. “The ultimate goal is to enable intelligent conversations about contentious issues.” |
| Google backtracks a bit on charging for its Maps API Posted: 22 Nov 2011 04:03 AM PST
Last month, Google announced it would start charging the most active users of its Google Maps API — in most cases, that’s those who generate over 25,000 map views a day. For news organizations, that was a big jarring, because Google Maps mashups are among the most popular news apps around. Most data-driven maps you find on news sites run on Google’s API, and the threat of having to pay for what had been a free tool led some to start searching for alternatives. But Google’s updated its geocoding blog with a post that should have the effect of easing some news organizations’ worries. Check it out yourself, but here are the two key points:
Google says only about 1 out of every 300 websites using the Maps API would be affected by the new fees, at current usage levels. Between that and the new exemptions and exceptions, for some news orgs at least, assembling a new map stack might just have dropped a bit on the to-do list. |
“I’m very interested in looking at ways to trigger people’s critical abilities so they think a little bit harder about what they’re reading…before adopting it into their worldview,” Schultz told me. It’s not that the truth isn’t out there, he says — it’s that it should be easier to find. He wants to embed critical thinking into news the way we embed photos and video today: “I want to bridge the gap between the corpus of facts and the actual media consumption experience.” 
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