AAPP website

You may want to ask about our @tkins online ordering software, perhaps Picpress book software, or you may want a closer look inside the lab. This Friday is your chance to get your questions answered.

You will find us sitting comfortably in the fish bowl at 89 Fullarton Rd Kent Town from 4.30, see you there!

If you click to enlarge the images you can see who took the photographs and link through to their website. The first five are the top five from our competition, the reset are in a random order.

Link to gallery.

Your Style Photography 2010 winner!

Simmone won with 9.77% of the vote. In a close second came Allison Hernach at 9.08%, and in third place Melissa Landers of Gloss Photography with 7.57%.

Simmone has won a full page ad in the South Australian Brides Diary.

All of the entries are up in the shop here at AtkinsTechnicolour, and shortly there will be a link to some of the entrants websites.

Link for more information on the competition.

The true value of social media has clearly been realised on a personal level, it’s sheer popularity must mean there is something in it. Now we have scientific evidence to back this up.

Oxitocin is the hormone that both stimulates labour and milk production in the childbirth process, it is also responsible for the “bonding” process. That is the process where a mother and baby form an instant, deep connection. Further to this, scientist have been exploring Oxitocin’s influence in the social recognition process.

While the research is still in it’s infancy, there appears to be a link between the presence of Oxitocin, when in close contact with friends and loved ones, lower stress levels and feeling of contentment and affection.

And to top it all off, studies have shown levels of Oxitocin increase whether you are physically with your friends and loved ones, or you are interacting with them on-line using social networking.

So now we are beginning to understand that sharing time with people on-line is similar in emotional value to physically sharing their presence. Placing on my economic survival hat;  as businesses, can we make use of this?

Yes we can. Providing we as businesses are a part of our customers’ life in a valuable way.

I do not believe there is any value in using social networking unless you are prepared to strike up and maintain strong relationships with your clients. Merely broadcasting (at best, spamming at worst) to your clients will elicit response rates similar to direct mail (very low at best, black banned at worst).

The secret to making Facebook and Twitter work is to enhance your ‘word of mouth’ marketing, to help the fans of your business become true advocates, so they speak about you to their networks, broadening your reach.

So picture Twitter and Facebook like a big party where you can move around the room mingling with your friends. Twitter and Facebook keeps the party open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

You need to ask your business self, would you invite you to the party?

Paul Atkins

Link to article that prompted this post

High Falls Rochester - Kodak tower back right

Kodak invited me to attend their annual Prolab workshop in their Hometown of Rochester, New York, USA. The workshop was attended by 200 of Kodak’s professional photolab clients, some attendees were amongst the biggest labs in the world.

The workshop centered around Kodak’s lab software DP2, the sessions ran in three streams, basic, advanced and management. The sessions were ran by the programmers and tech support people from the DP2 team. Not a PR person in sight.

To my thinking, this is a pretty brave thing to do. Like any software, it cannot be perfect and it will attract crticism. So to run a show this way you would need to be confident of your product and people.

So the information we got was incredibly useful, the opportunity to have our questions asked by *the* guy (Tom Apeland) who invented the product was exciting. The risk Kodak took is a bit like marketing with social media, you know someone is going to say something bad about your company/product on your public blogs, but you know you have to be there, so you had better be watching and ready to respond, and hope your fans help out.

This workshop was a risk that really paid off. Well done Kodak. I will continue to be amazed at the depth of talent and foresightedness this company delivers.

Paul Atkins

(what is DP2? Kodak’s print software, more on this in a future post.)

Come in for a cuppa and a chat! All funds to the Cancer Council of SA

Mercury Megaloudis – Creating Award Winning Prints

Seminar Wednesday will start at 9.30am, be there by 8.55am to get your place.

The Tuesday afternoon session for the AIPP is still on at the Rob Roy.