Social Media Monitoring Project Post 2: Digital Photo Academy

After spending almost two months monitoring Digital Photo Academy's online presence, I have a lot of suggestions for improvements on their online content. For a small company that spends very little time on their website and social media, I am fairly satisfied with their currently online presence but I know that things can improve. According to Compete, the number of unique visitors DPA receives is steadily increasing:

 

With almost 10,000 unique visitors in February, when they usually receive 3 - 6,000 unique visitors per month. They also average about 100 new Facebook likes per week, passing the 5,000 mark on March 20th. For more information on DPA's current online statistics, please refer to my last blog post. 

Keeping Bernoff's five objectives of Listening, Talking, Energizing, Supporting and Embracing in mind, I have made several suggestions for updates that I think would vastly improve DPA's online appearance.

A. Get Rid of The Blog:

In Groundswell, Bernoff says that a company should not create a blog if they cannot devote the time to upkeep, as a bad blog is “worse than not having a blog at all (115),” and “pulling the pull will have a negative impact on your customers (123).” Unfortunately, we cannot go back in time and stop the blog from every having been made, but I am confident that by embracing Facebook and Twitter, DPA can accomplish everything that had hoped the blog would without losing customers. Since the blog has not been updated in over a year, it is clearly time to move on.  It needs to be deleted from the website and Facebook page so that DPA students or future students do not click on it and see that it has been neglected.

B. Triple Check Everything that goes on The Website:

-Make sure there are no formatting inconsistencies in the Instructor Bio pages and City pages

-Classes far in the future are listed as "Sold Out" when they are not

C. Update the Website Frequently:

-Assignment section should be updated every month

-Staff Section not current 

D. Make Necessary Changes to Facebook, and Update Frequently

-Add a cover page

-Expand the information listed under "info"

-"Like" every Instructor's Facebook page (if they have them) and make sure every instructor has "liked" DPA

-Add videos from website to Facebook page

-Every schedule update and new city added should be announced on Facebook and Tweeted

-Require every instructor with a Facebook to post and tweet at least one picture from each class

-Button for "Like My Picture Contest" currently leads to a blank page --> Have quarterly contests with actual prizes

-Encourage students to upload pictures to Facebook for instructor feedback

-Tweet and post an "Instructor Tip Of The Week"

-Answer every question posted to Facebook and Twitter in a timely manner

-Occasional office updates to remind people this a small business and not a large corporation

E. Tweet Often

-Other than Tweeting information that is also going on Facebook, they should also respond to every single Tweet that mentions taking a DPA class

Conclusion:

Since Digital Photo Academy is such a small company, it is unsurprising that they are unable to devote a significant period to their online presence or hire an employee who is devoted solely to online upkeep. However, I feel confident that if they devote some time to the changes I suggest, upkeep will be minimal. If one employee were to spend one hour per workday, or at the very least one hour twice a week, Digital Photo Academy’s online presence could easily see a vast improvement. As Bernoff says, “You cannot ignore this trend … you have to move forward (75).”

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.