Alex Craig: I always look for stories , I guess because as an outsider I’m trying to understand what’s going on around me , I get excited by the things that are different and within that the things we share as people , that aim has been there since I first picked up a camera

Photolibrary: It shows and positions what you do really well as people are tending to seek the quality of your work to make their campaigns stand out. Its an rare cross between commercial and artistic pursuits that’s developing in the stock industry and might just be the positive spin on the influx of “stocky” images flooding micro-stock sites. Anyway, what’s you take on the whole micro-stock / traditional stock library situation?

Alex Craig: I don’t really know enough about it but there are a lot of photographers who are producing passionate , individual work to compete with the more generic images, hopefully there’s room for both but people tend to decide, if the images used aren’t effective then it will show on a commercial level but again I don’t really know. I have a really good relationship with Photolibrary and I don’t see how that would be achieved at one of the many microstock venues , there are so many changes going on in all of the media based industries it’s hard to guess where all the pieces will fall.

It’s much easier to start with quality, marketing is then about communicating this quality and your company’s value is rewarded by economic value.

That’s why we’re beginning to see at Photolibrary that what you actually want is quality - and we have an abundance of quality images, footage and music. The next step for us is to keep finding better ways to show you the quality content we have, help you easily find it and improve the systems that enable you to do so.

2010 will prove an exciting year here at Photolibrary, be prepared to be surprised!

There’s not a lot industry news sites that offer the same extent of fresh articles and opinions throughout the day with a real sense of community input. Some of us at Photolibrary already find Mumbrella viewings as habitual as coffee, so we thought we’d throw a few questions to Tim Burrowes the editor of Mumbrella to find out what’s in the Mumbrella mix that keeps reeling us back in for more.

Tim Burrowes aka Dr Mumbo - first Studio 33 appearance:

Take the “media” out of social media and you’re left with the word “social”. It’s easy to be tangled in metrics about what makes social media successful and overlook that simple point. Facebook and the like suit our present communication needs, so we use it. It works because connecting with people through social media is easy in a time starved and an otherwise disconnected daily existence.

Amazing to see that as the tide shifts in favor of social media being the dominant way to communicate online, Godin’s “Permission Marketing” ideas are even more relevant.

One of the greatest feats of modern advertising is the ability to seep into every facet of our modern lives, no longer limited to traditional media like television and print, new media is the next frontier, with campaigns reaching deep into the latest tools we use to communicate. Email marketing floods the inbox, Facebook spits out targeted banners and clever viral apps, Twitter is bombarded by promotional ‘tweets’ and soon just walking near a Starbucks will alert us to the free cookie we’ll get with every coffee – the delights of GPS and new mobiles phones!

Usability gurus like Jakob Neilson are ongoing proponents of the idea that websites are about getting information - a website is only as good as how effectively it transfers information to the user.
In the early 2000’s Neilson wrote:
Ultimately users visit your website for its content. Everything else is just the backdrop. The old analogy is [...]

Photolibrary jumped on the Twitter bandwagon a few months ago and it’s proved to be a useful endeavor.
An interesting aspect of Twitter from a business perspective is the ability to gage real-time information on topics about your brand or the brand name itself. Search engines will always take time to “crawl” any new content that [...]

The web is an organic shape shifting monster – so what once was great for SEO (search engine optimisation)  is now something to avoid.
10 years ago Google rewarded sites listed on long “link directory” type pages but today this practice makes your site spam and only helps to drop it down few notches.
The most effective [...]