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Shooting for the new King

With more and more brands getting involved in social media and social media becoming more and more visual, the need for photography is exploding.
To be a relevant brand today, especially if your target audience is the young and connected, you need, at minimum, accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest and your own blog. Needless to say that all of these center around photogrpahy and need to be updated regurlary.
Posting product shots is just not going to cut it and stock photography is certainly not a solution. You just could be seen using the same picture than your competitor or an opposite brand.
In order to be social media friendly, a photograph needs to be attractive. It needs to grab the viewers attention and his desire to share. It  needs to tell a story.
There is a huge yet untapped market for photography professionals here, half way between  product shots and visual storytelling. A kind of brand photojournalism that would enhance the product stories.
A photographer or a group of photographers could offer to become a brand’s official photographers, building a continuous portfolio of images to be shared and discovered on social media only.
A smart brand would hire creative photographers and let them roam freely. Handled by in house photo editors, those images would then be published on the appropriate social media outlet.
A sort of internal photo agency, producing an endless stream of fresh original images needed to propel the brand at the top of social media hit parade.
Or brands could decided to associate themselves with existing prolific photogrpahers . In the spirit of “brought to you by..” they could be closely associated with someone who already has a very strong social media following and have their name associated with him.
Needless to say, this is already happening in a very proto internal way . Brands currently use images mostly taken by their employees, ignoring, for now, the real value proposition of highly creative professional image. But the time is not far ( Apple, Nike, Levi’s ?) when a smart brand will jump on this huge opportunity to differentiate itself from the pack  and start commissioning made for social media photography, the same way magazines used to assign stories. A perfectly crafted ‘made for social media” photo shoot of a few thousand dollars could have the impact of a multimillion ad campaign. Repeat a few times ( social media tends to have a short attention span) and your brand is quickly the number one.

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