Using Balance in Your Landscape Photography Composition~By Gavin Hardcastle

If you want to take your landscape photography to the next level, it’s time to start thinking about how you balance your subjects. The most powerful compositional tools that you have at your disposal are your knees, and your feet.
Simply stepping to the side a couple of feet can change your landscape compositions drastically. Take things one step further (weak pun intended) and bend those old knees to get a lower point of view. Now things might start to look more interesting.
The reason why I say this is because horizontal and vertical movement will allow you to achieve the ideal balance of subjects in your landscape images. If you’ve got a camera with one of those flippable LCD screens, you’ll be able to get right down on the ground or way up high on your tripod. Nice.

So what do I mean by ‘balance’?

Something Wicked

I’m referring to how you balance subjects in your image on the horizontal and vertical planes. Simply plonking your interesting subject slap bang in the centre of your image might work, but there are times when you might get a better composition by placing it to one side of your image, and counter balancing that with something on the opposing side.
With my image above ‘ Something Wicked’, I wanted the moody storm clouds to be the main subject but it was essential to capture it bearing down on the mesa. By devoting the lower third of the frame to the mesa and the upper two thirds to the menacing clouds above, I balanced the subjects to my liking.

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Gavin Hardcastle is a professional landscape photographer from Vancouver Island, BC Canada. He teaches photography workshops all over the world and writes extensively about his experiences on location. You can read his photo guides and tutorials at his photo adventure blog FotoTripper His fine art prints can be purchased from www.gavinhardcastle.com.

10 Google+ Communities for PR Pros, SEOs and Social Media Experts

by Violeta-Loredana Pascal

There are many public relations professionals who joined Google+ and share articles and interesting findings on this network. Communities are great places to keep in touch with PR peeps who share the same passion and interests, to exchange ideas, get tips and feel the pulse of the industry.
Below are ten Google+ Communities you should consider joining. They are listed based on the number of members, and cover a wide range of PR, communications and marketing aspects so that all the PR people on Google+ can find something that meets their interests.

1. Marketing+ – A Community of Marketers. Mobile Local Social Search PR – has over 1700 members. This community invites its members to “assemble some brilliant minds in marketing and connect… so, we can help marketing NOT suck.” Many interesting articles here!
2. Public Relations – A place for PR pros to talk about workflow, tools, tips, etc., – it is a community with over 1300 members sharing interesting and useful content in various categories.
3. Social media – this is a community with over 1300 members. The official presentation mentions that beginners and seasoned pros are all invited to learn from each other.
4. Online Marketing – A great community to talk about Online Marketing – with Email Marketing, Display, analytics and any other areas of performance marketing. They also run monthly events for professionals working in the space.
5. Social media – Discover How To Use Social Media For Your Business! – has almost 900 members and is a social media community devoted to helping businesses and marketers use social media more effectively.
6. Online Marketing – Where SEO SEM Online Marketing and webmasters meet – is a community with over 600 members discussing SEO, SEM, online Marketing best practices and so forth.
7. Search Marketing – The latest news, tips, articles, and discussions in Search Marketing – has over 500 members and it is a Google+ community that was created to bring you the latest in Paid Search,th over 1000 members, open for anyone who deals with SEO, PPC, Social Media, Affiliate Marketing,  SEO and Social Media and as a platform for open discussions and idea sharing.
8. PR and Public Relations – A Google+ group for PR professionals both in house and agency. This community has almost 300 members, but only few share content. However, the articles and recommendations you’ll find here will make you join the community dedicated to PR professionals from around the world.
9. PR & Communications Professionals – Increase networking and facilitate discussions on industry trends. This community has over 260 members, but it is a community very relevant to PR pros so I simply had to feature it on this list. There are many categories with relevant and interesting topics, designed for industry professionals interested in the latest news and discussions about public relations, marketing, branding, social media and more.
10. Inbound Marketing – all-in-one marketing resources is a community with over 260 members sharing articles and discussing SEO, social media, marketing, PR, etc.

Yes, I know, there is also Internet Marketing – A Network of Internet Marketing Professionals community, with over 1300 members, but I find the content on the other communities to be more interesting, and since it is a list of 10, this community gets a mention here.
Another important thing: yes, you will find some people and articles in more than one community. In the end, you can check these communities and see which one(s) are of more interest to you and then join them.


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Is social media all the market research you need?~Andrea Goldberg

In Mike Moran’s recent post, he pointed out that digital marketing is more about understanding marketing than it is about being a technology expert. I could not agree more. One certainly needs to understand the basics of marketing to be successful in digital marketing. But, I would like to take this argument even further, understanding marketing is necessary but not sufficient. It is all about understanding customers and their wants, needs and values. Market research rocks!
In the fast-paced world we live in, carefully constructed research that focuses on identifying customer underlying needs and enables segmentation has largely fallen out of favor. In our service economy, it is very easy to create new offerings and use digital media to establish a brand, put out messages, create buzz, etc. The cost of entry is minimal and digital marketers have gotten good at using sophisticated tactics to reach their targets. But, I am concerned that we sometimes lose sight of why things fail. Even the most innovative products and the most sophisticated digital marketing campaigns will fall short if at the end of the day they do not satisfy some basic or perceived need or are out of tune with prevailing norms and values. Yes, we can tune in and listen to the chatter. But do we really understand what our clients need? And do we take the time to do post mortems and understand what went wrong when we do not succeed? Or, as I suspect, do we simply go on to the next new thing?
As we move further into a world where digital has replaced paper and online search terms have replaced 30 second TV ads, have we forgotten some of the basics? It we only listen to the on-line chatter might we miss the opportunity to fulfill desires that are not expressed? And, are we failing to get the kind of insights or feedback we need?
At the end of the day, I think it is about balance. I have seen companies eliminate brand tracking and customer loyalty studies because they believe they can find out what they need online. Web analytics are important tools, but they do not necessarily tell us why. Is a customer that reads your blog or clicks on your site necessarily a loyal customer? The digital world is full of metrics and on-line behavior tracking. What motivates that behavior is a little more difficult to discern.
So, while I am not advocating that everything be learned through one-way mirrors or phone-based surveys, I do propose that the right tools be employed to gain insights about current and potential clients. The best of all worlds might be to pair the two types of data so that one can understand how online behaviors correlate with attitudes, satisfaction and loyalty. In this way, one could, for example, understand the behavioral pattern of customers who are considering defection and develop a strategy to prevent them from departing. Too often, we act only after they have already gone when it is too late.
Insights can come from online tools and communities. But they can also come from analyzing data by segment or from simply asking why. And, while old-fashioned, surveys, ideation sessions and focus groups may actually turn out be good investments, “Build it and they will come” might work well in the movies, but it never was a great marketing concept!

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