Casual business portraits – what does your Linked In or facebook profile image say?

Does your Linked In profile image say, boring, uninteresting, average or worse?

Every day I see stodgy and stiff portraits as well as just plain bad photos or snapshots of people on their Facebook profiles, on Linked-In profiles and on business websites. Everyone has heard the old saying that a picture can say a thousand words, but what words is your picture saying about you and your business?

Here are recent portraits taken for Danielle Deramo, the owner of Just Say It. She is a marketing and branding consultant here in the Dayton area. She has a great outgoing personality, but she has been using snapshots for her web site and other business networking websites. She almost canceled this session because she just does not like to have her picture taken. I encouraged her to go ahead with the session, which normally only takes about 30 minutes, because she needed some nicer pictures for her Linked-In profile and other internet business networking venues. These were taken conveniently at her home. She likes the middle image best because she says she looks happy. I am pleased with several of the portraits.

    

Upgrade your image on-line business networking sites

Is it time for you to upgrade your image on business social networking venues or even on your own website? Rather than a formal business portrait, would you like a casual setting and a more relaxed portrait? Maybe it is time to call Peter DeMott Photography.

Learn more about casual business portraits made here: Business Portrait Photography 

Peter DeMott Photography • peter@photosbypdemott.com • 937-478-6222

Now go to my Facebook page. Click here to go to my Facebook page and join the conversation.

Or you can go to my Testimonials page and see what people have to say about their portraits and their session.

You can also join me on Linked In

Our good friend Pegge Bellamy and her vision to create a great homemade organic salsa company

Pegge Bellamy is a great friend. She is just plain fun to be around because her energy and loving personality. Actually, I would not know her except that she is a lovely friend to my wife Patty. As a result, I can say that she is my friend too. I did senior portraits for her daughter Sarah and will be doing portraits of her younger daughter as senior year approaches.

Pegge has a vision to start a natural healthy organic salsa company. For 11 years she has been making salsa and giving it to friends and family as gifts. Now she has a vision to make a company around herself (full of energy and enthusiasm) and her fatastic salsa recipe. Recently, we had a portrait session with the goal of coming up with photographs that can be used on her labels, her web site, facebook and her brochures about her product and company.

What I want to know is did we capture some of that energy that her friends know? If you knew that Pegge was the chef for a natural healthy organic salsa, wouldn’t you just want to at least try some. Can you see her joy in living and her great healthy outlook on life?

In this portrait she is wearing an apron that she has used for year when she prepares her secret recipe for her salsa. I have suggested that she meet with my web guy Larry Davis to set up a wordpress web site and blog to tell her story as it progresses. She has a group of retired businessmen providing her with advice and direction. After they met her and tried her salsa several of them said they would want  to invest in her company when her plans were set and she was ready to go forward. Everyone who meets her and hears about what she wants to do is inspired by her outlook and energy about her product and her vision for her company.

So, if you see Pegge’s label with one of these pictures on it would you be intrigued and want to buy her salsa? Use the comment  with a click on the “leave a comment” link near the title of this entry. Do you have advice or connections for Pegge to help her get started as a woman entrepreneur? Please use the “leave a comment” link at the top of the page just under the title of this post.

A few more of the portraits are available to review here: Peggy Bellamy’s all natural healthy salsa

Pegge was very happy with connections that she made at the business networking group in Dayton called Rainmakers. She has put up her profile on the free networking web site for Rainmakers: Rainmakers OHIO . Having a captivating image as a profile image for Facebook or Linked In or Rainmakers is important so I helped Pegge load up the last image here as her profile image. It worked perfectly and I am sure will generate a lot of interest to help her with making important business connections as she starts her business.

That little profile pic that shows up when you comment on blogs – Gravatar How to

How to get an avatar or profile pic to show up when you comment on other people’s blogs

Darned if it didn’t take me some serious searching to figure out how to get the little avatar or profile picture of me to show up in that little box when I make a comment on someone’s blog. One thing you learn in Facebook is that the blank face is not welcome. The first rule on Facebook is to show people who you are. There are probably 300 Peter DeMotts out there and there is one in New York who is no longer for this world who has hundreds of articles and links about his anti war protests in New York. When I make a comment somewhere or if someone sees me on Facebook, I want them to know that I am the Peter DeMott that is still alive and living in Germantown, Ohio and who is a portrait and equine photographer. I want them to know that I love photography and do on location senior portraits all around the greater Dayton, Ohio area. I also want them to know that I am not the anti war protester from New York.

So, I wanted to figure out how to load up that little box with MY PICTURE. I searched WordPress several times. Then I searched the word avatar and looked around. Of course I had to sift through many blogs and web news items about the block buster movie Avatar.

Finally I saw a post by a business blog about the GRAVATAR web site. Gravatar stands for Globally Recognized Avatars. To my surprise, they did not list the web site URL or any instructions about it. It was just a short news item.

Here is what I found when I got there:

Gravatar.com and WordPress.com share the same user database. It’s possible that you registered a WordPress.com account (either for a blog or for an Akismet API key,) which automatically now gives you a Gravatar.com account. If you use your WordPress.com password to log in you should experience no problems using Gravatar. If you cannot remember that password you may use the forgotten password link on the login page to reset your password.

Akismet is a great plugin that eliminates 99.999% of spam comment posts on your blog. If you don’t have that you will be sorting through junk comment posts by the hundreds every day. I had already loaded up Akismet and had gotten an API key, but I never had heard anything about Gravatars. So, once I found this site and logged in, I was able to quickly uploaded a profile pic or avatar and now, where ever I post a comment instead of the blank face avatar, it shows me (not the fellow from New York) and I have a camera in my hands. It was easy once I got my password and logged on. It took a couple of hours for the Gravatar to load up throughout the internet, but when I came back from doing some work outside… I saw some of my comments with my gravatar showing.

You would think that there would be places that explains this stuff, but  there really isn’t. It’s stuff that you pick up little pieces at a time. The one business site that talked about it provided no links or instructions at all. It just explained that you could do it…..How? please. Anyway, if you are wondering where and how, hopefully this post will find you so you too can load up a Globally Recognized Avatar so you will no longer be that blank face thing staring out from your comments.

Here is the GRAVATAR web site: http://en.gravatar.com/

This is me: at http://www.photosbypdemott.com living in Germantown, Ohio

This is NOT me: at http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/02/21-5 no longer living in New York, but who has very many news stories posted throughout the internet about his anit war activities, arrest and trial, incarceration, and recent death (2009).

The power of pictures in advertising and networking

This morning I went to the AM Centerville Rainmakers business networking meeting. I had the privilege to invite Dave Herlihy to visit and find out more about this group. Dave is the owner of FLOORCO which is a flooring company in Miamisburg just down the road from Interstate Ford.

It was fun to introduce him around to various key contacts for him. A realtor, a builder, a remodeler and others. He left the meeting excited about the Rainmaker model of business oriented social networking.

Dave is well known in our church, Fairhaven here in the Dayton area and I was meeting with him later to discuss advertising in REACH magazine for his flooring company. As we discussed what his ad might look like, I suggested that it would be important to have his picture in the ad. The person who shared at the Rainmakers meeting talked about how she had lost business because people went with someone else saying, “I didn’t know that you did that, I would have called you if I had known.” She explained that she now has 30-40% of her business coming from networking. So in my discussion with Dave, I told him that we did not know (me and Patty, my wife) that his store was also retail flooring. We thought it was just direct to the trades. I suggested that the first thing he would want to do in his ad was to put his picture in it so that all the people who have the same misunderstanding that Patty and I had, would see his face and think of him when they had a flooring need. Many people at Fairhaven, for example, have the same misunderstanding about his business. By the way, Dave is coming to my home to measure our back porch and recommend flooring options for us. I trust Dave and know that as I do my barn studio build out that I will be calling him again.

In today’s business environment, more and more, people like doing business with people they know. Dave knows boatloads of people, but many don’t know they could go directly to him to purchase flooring. My feeling is that since Dave is such a well know and likable fellow, that as soon as we can “get the word out that he sells direct too” he will begin to gain business.

Leaving the Rainmakers meeting with a half dozen or more very good contacts, Dave decided to join Rainmakers on the spot and take advantage of special savings being offered that day. When I met with him to discuss REACH Magazine, the first half of our meeting was spent discussing the Rainmaker networking model. Then we talked about direct mail with REACH Magazine targeting the south part of the Dayton area market.

What does this all have to do with a photography blog? I have helped people in Rainmakers by improving their PROFILE picture on the business networking web sites like LINKEDIN and RAINOHIO. As I have met and gotten to know fellow Rainmakers, I startled one young lady by telling her that her profile picture did not do her any favors in promoting herself. I suggested that at the next meeting I would take a profile photo of her to use. She was a willing candidate, but seemed very skeptical that it would have any impact for her. I sent her several pictures to choose from and she uploaded one as her new profile portrait. The first thing that happened was that she got complements on her new profile portrait almost daily for several weeks. You will have to ask her yourself if it had direct impact on the number of appointments that she was having, but I suspect that it made a lot of difference. For anyone who is on FACEBOOK or LINKEDIN or RAINOHIO with a blank profile (No picture uploaded), you are severely cutting down your potential impact.

Does your profile portrait show you as relaxed, enjoyable, confident, outgoing, etc……?

This is Melody McCord’s new profile portrait. What do you think? What did her old profile picture look like..it was a picture of her at a resort and it was so far away that you could not make out her face. You can look her up at the Rainmakers web site for OHIO at RainOhio.com. You can also look at the EVENTS tab along the right of the page to see where the Rainmakers meeting will be. You are welcome to come and visit and, if I am there, please introduce yourself to me.