Digital Photo Academy Monitoring Post 1

Digital Photo Academy is a small company founded in 2006 by my father, 

Richard Rabinowitz. Based out of our apartment in downtown Manhattan, Digital Photo Academy has photography and photo shop classes in 24 cities at the beginner, intermediate, and advanced level. The classes are taught by sixty different photographers who each work 1 to 3 times a month, and the office in New York has two full-time employees (including a recent Clark alum) other than the CEO Richard Rabinowitz, three part-time employees (including a book keeper), and an intern. Since the company is so small and could use a lot of help further developing their online presence, I already had a lot of knowledge about its needs and inner-workings, I thought it would be a good company to focus on for this project. In the past six years, Digital Photo Academy has had about 10,000 students. Currently, most of these students are directed through Digital Photo Academy's partnership with Living Social and Groupon, who offer discounted classes when people buy deals through their websites. 

Since Digital Photo Academy is such a small company, they do not have a very large online presence. On days when Living Social or Groupon deals "dropped," the company always sees an increase in number of sign ups that they receive, but this is not always clear by checking online monitoring sites. They appear to be getting the most attention on Twitter, where people will often tweet when they have bought a deal for an upcoming class. If Twitter users tag Digital Photo Academy in these tweets, they will occationally receive a response such as "welcome to the class!" or "we're excited to have you!" If they see that someone tweets negative comments about learning to use a camera, they might also respond with a suggestion to take another class. 

However, people tweet that they are joining the classes far more frequently than they get responses and there does not appear to be any reason behind why some people get responses and others do not. On Kurrently, the stream speed is always listed as slow, but every time I have checked there are new tweets about taking a Digital Photo Academy class. 

On Social Mention, the strength never went above 1%. However, for such a small company I think that 8 - 13% reach is not too bad - though there is obviously room for improvement. In terms of sentiment, the "negative comments" that Social Mention are actually a link to a YouTube video that has the word "angry" in it. This is the same problem I ran into when checking Same Point, which marked most of the reviews as negative because they used the word "shoot," which is of course common when talking about photography. 

The Facebook page in particular needs a lot of work. When you click on the Twitter icon, it does not automatically bring you to their Twitter page, but they still include a link to their blog which has not been updated in months. Since Facebook switched their page to Timeline, they really have not made any necessary adjustments, such as adding a cover page. 

In the past month, they have gained 500 "likes", and similar to Twitter, on days when Groupon and Living Social deals drop more people are "talking" about them on Facebook. I have a lot of suggestions to make in my final report, but I'm excited to have this opportunity to help out my family.