Brian Auer of Epic Edits has done it again. He announced a Writing Project on Social Photography.
I find the project inspiring and community building as well. It inspires me to write about something that I probably wouldn’t have written about otherwise. And it builds the photography blogging community by strengthening our relationship with each other.

I would like share how I use social media to take part in the photography community on the Internet for learning, getting exposed to ideas and opinions, exposing my work too and attracting visitors to my blog as well.

I start with a few facts.
I am neither a pro photographer nor a pro blogger. I make my photos when I can steel some time from family or rest and I’m a “when the kids are sleepin’ and wife is in the bathroom” kind of hobbyist blogger.
I’m Hungarian living in Hungary and writing in English which is not my first language.
From my blog statistics: between May 2007 and Jan 2008 I had 19.868 visits and 41.618 page views by 16.761 absolutely unique visitors. My visitors clicked on ads (Google Adsense) on my blog generating roughly 14 USD – really – during this time. So believe me, my blog is not about money.

Flickr
My photos are not spectacular (yet ). Hence I do not have too many views of them on Flickr. However, sometimes I get some encouraging comments on my images. From time to time I send some of my pictures to Flick groups which gives the photos more visibility. And occasionally I write a small comment in the description field saying that the full story is on my blog at this and this URL. This brings some traffic to my blog and sometimes starts some discussions in the form of comments.
Flickr is not only a photo sharing tool. With the possibilities of commenting pictures, joining groups and participating in group discussions it is a lively scenery of photography related discussions. Check out this one related to flashlights as an example.
Flickr is also a tool for getting noticed. As I wrote about it earlier one of my photos was found and used in a city guide. Great photos of talented photographers are found this way and some lucky – and needless to say, hard working – ones are getting even paid for their work. Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir is certainly one of the greatest talents on Flickr. Dave (Strobist) Hobby referred to her story as ‘the most famous Cinderella Story of the Flickr world to date‘ in his article about her and encouraged the rest of us with that her example is not unique. Here are Rebekka’s Tips For Flickr Success, an article on How To Get Paid for your Flickr Photos and another 36 Reasons for using Flickr as a tool for photographers.
Flickr is run buy a company, but even more by people. Sometimes there are some flaws in its operation impacting photo sharing users which even Rebekka experienced and wrote about in her blog.
Flickr is a great tool. I like the service and the user front-end. I have an annually renewed Pro account on it. It’s not Flickr’s fault that we are still human beings with emotions and desires. Mostly desires. Make a guess of what type of pictures are viewed the most on Flickr then check the group of over 10.000 views.
An interesting train of thoughts was initiated by an experiment on Flickr: posting a Cartier-Bresson photo to a deleteme group. After some positive comments lots of negative ones were posted about lack of sharpness and things like that. Yes, sometimes artistic pictures get buried by the opinion of the masses while pretty pictures are highly appreciated. The outcome of “wisdom of crowds” that keeps social media alive is sometimes ambiguous.

Jumpcut and Animoto
Jumpcut and Animoto are newcomers comparing to Flickr but it’s worth to keep an eye on them.
Update: Jumpcut is closing on June 15, 2009 as “part of the ongoing prioritization efforts at Yahoo!”
Jumpcut is a photo sharing and video publishing site with a full featured on-line video and slideshow editing tool. You can upload your images to your repository or Jumpcut can suck your photos from Flickr. (Both belong to Yahoo! and your Flickr and Jumpcut accounts can be linked.) The Web 2.0 slideshow editor does not require anything else than your browser and is amazingly simple to use.
The real hit on Jumpcut is that you can remix others’ clips and others can do the same with yours.
Animoto is a special kind of animal: when you upload your images (or let Animoto pull them from your Flickr account) and select or upload your music Animoto analyses the pictures and sound and creates a unique clipof differently transitioned images. Transitions and time-line is chosen automatically and cannot be overwritten. However you might click on Remix to create a new clip which is going to be different.
Animoto clips can then be uploaded to YouTube.

photographyVoter.com
photographyVoter.com- an other great social media example – is the Digg for photographers. The basic engine is the same or very similar: you submit your entries referring to a Web site or blog post of your interest and others can vote for or bury that. I usually post my own articles (selfishly) on photographyVoter.com if I think that the article can be useful for others. I do not submit blog posts about my pictures though.
I made the first position of the first page of photographyVoter.com a few times now. You can bet I celebrated the first occasion. Being on the first page definitely generates some traffic to my blog.
Posting my articles taught me a bit of marketing. The title is extremely important. When the title sounds like a pro opinion or it is harsh in some way it captures attention. Just like newspaper headlines. Titles having some tangible numbers at the beginning like 5 Traps of…, 5 Slideshow Tools…, 10 Learnings of… are attractive too. Provocative or doubtful questions can also be interesting like Why are beginner photographers shy?, Are Strobists Techno-fetishists?.
However title is not everything. I read from pro bloggers that people are looking for answers on the Web and sustaining traffic comes only if there is real, valuable content on your blog, ie you give the answers people are looking for. My article comparing Lightroom and Nikon Capture NX was on the top of Google results if the name of the two software solutions were typed.
See how this very article is doing on PhotographyVoter.com. Thanks for the votes

Propeller
Propeller – for me – is just like Digg or photographyVoter.com. You submit links and others are voting for them. It does bring traffic, but relatively small. I think the reason for that is that Propeller is not that targeted as e.g. photographyVoter is.
You can have a look how this article is going on Propeller here. Thank you for your votes again.

Squidoo
I read Seth Godin’s blog regularly. He is a marketing guru sharing some great ideas and often promoting Squidoo. This is how I heard about Squidoo and created my first Squidoo lens. For me Squidoo is a fancy blog engine. It supports e.g. embedding YouTube videos in much more user friendly way than Wordpress does and even takes care of placing ads on your lens. (You might request the money collected by the ads to be sent to charities or for yourself.)
I expected Squidoo to bring some traffic to my real blog, but it doesn’t really do that. There were only 3 click outs to my blog from my lens during the past 30 days.
For Squidoo the same thing applies as to any other blogs: content does matter. In my Squidoo lens I do not create real content, that’s what my blog is for, I rather put a short lead there and a link to my article on my blog.
If someone selects Squidoo as her primary blogging platform it can be a great tool. For me, using it for promotional purposes, it doesn’t work.
There are quite a few negative writings around the net connecting Squidoo with spam, adult content and overusing SEO. Even Google penalized Squidoo probably due to spam.

StumbleUpon
StumbleUpongives a new way of surfing experience. After specifying your interests on the site and installing the StumbleUpon toolbar for your browser you can start clicking on the Stumble button and ‘channel surfing‘ lots of, lots of sites within very short time.
As a user I experienced that I spend only a few seconds on sites reached by Stumble and then decided immediately not to take seriously the traffic coming from that direction. My assumption is that the highest peaks in my page-view statistics are coming from Stumble users and that does not mean a lot. So I think this tool does not really build relationships and links between people and their work.
Obviously some people think differently like the author of the Comprehensive Guide to StumbleUpon. With great design that captures attention, in-depth content, exclusive on-site materials you can make your visitors revisit your site.

Blogs
You can read a lot about how you can increase the number of your readers: writing guest posts on others’ blogs, commenting on forums and blogs, organizing contests on your blog, writing genuine content and so on. All of them are about the very same thing: connecting with people. Being connected means being known and may mean being respected. Isn’t it what we all selfishly doing it for?
I have used only a few of those tips: I commented on forums and others’ blogs, and now for example with this piece of writing I participate in a community project. No contests, not even voting buttons on my posts, and never ever written a guest post.

I’m sure others leverage social media tools at a much higher level than I do. Some people are even making a life with and off them. And if you are one of those you can work location independently. But there is one thing to note: it is hard work and requires time.