Finding Danny Glover - Finding Clay

A couple of months ago, I needed a model for an advertising shoot for book publishing giant Zondervan. Their ad agency at Extra Credit Projects requested a model fitting a "Danny Glover type, black male, 50's with a grey peppered beard."

The shoot was on a tight timeline and we needed someone quickly. I reached out to my social media contacts on Facebook and Twitter and posted this photo of Danny Glover and asked if anyone knew of someone fitting the bill to contact me right away:

Within 5 minutes my friend Aaron over at Creo Productions emailed me the cell phone number of Clay...a guy who lived near their offices on Division Avenue.

I called Clay immediately on my way to another shoot. I explained I needed a model but had to get agency approval asap. He said he was eating pizza at Georgio's Pizza downtown and that I was welcome to drop in. I was only a few blocks from there. Within seconds I'd taken a quick iPhone shot and emailed it off to Extra Credit Projects for approval. Here's that iPhone shot:

Clay was approved right away...and we shot him a couple of days later. Clay's a very sweet man, an amazing poet and a bright light living in the resurging neighborhood of Heartside. Here's one of the shots that was submitted for the Zondervan advertisement. Don't underestimate the willingness of your social media contacts to help you when you need it most!

social networking craze

I started this blog about 16 months ago and have been pleased to see that the number of people checking it out has far exceeded anything I might have imagined.

In April of last year, I started to embrace facebook and twitter as experimentation...to reach out to professional as well as personal contacts. Follow me here.

The result is that I've found both facebook and twitter to be very valuable in sustaining friendly dialogue with friends and new people that I might have only infrequent or very random encounters. Facebook has reconnected me with personal relationships I haven't had in 15 years (or more)...and that's amazing by itself.

As for business relationships, I am very lucky to already have a very loyal client base, but I feel that the addition of social network dialogue (sharing mutual bits of our personal and work lives) has strengthened these relationships to beyond just being a photographer/client experience.  I have many new unexpected friendships.

I must say I'm not engaged in social media for the purpose of driving the bottom line, but social media is a useful tool in solidifying and strengthening all of my relationships. If in some cases my friends happen to help decide where marketing dollars are allocated and which photographers are awarded work, then it may indeed help my business (indirectly). 

I still have to be the best photographer for the job to be hired...but sometimes an ongoing conversation makes you a natural fit to reach out to when a client needs something new done.