I spent July 4th hanging out with my sister and her housemates at the Berkeley Marina Pier, where they had a sort of carnival going on. While we sat in our front row seats for the fireworks, an idea occurred to me. It seems pretty obvious, but here’s the idea:
People are always in groups at events like these — some couples, some families, some friend groups. And people may or may not have a camera amongst their group, and even where there is one, most people shy away from asking someone to take a photograph of their group. So the idea basically goes like this:
1) someone from an online photo printing company, say Ofoto, should be at events like these
2) they should run around taking pictures of families, friends, and couples that they see
3) they should hand out cards with a URL on it that will take them to the photographs from the event on the Ofoto website
You’d have a certain number of people visit the Ofoto website and from there some people would share the photographs by e-mail with other members of their family and some people would actually order prints of their photographs. Ofoto entices potential customers with something free, gets referals to other potential customers and potentially also drives sales of photo prints. Everyone wins.
It seems like independent photographers would be the best suited for discovering and shooting events like this. They could then earn money from an ofoto affiliate program.
Rakesh,
The Red Sox have been offering a FanFoto service now for several years at Fenway Park.
http://www.printroom.com/pro/redsoxfanphotos/
It is sponsored by Nikon so the photographers use Nikon DSLR’s which is great exposure for Nikon (who took the sponsorship deal from Canon). This service is actually run by the Fenway Sports Group which is owned by the Red Sox and they have expanded to several other ball parks.
They use printroom.com as a back-end for printing and fulfillment and let you put the photos in a template/frame with team branding. I have actually purchased several of these as keepsakes. The economics of the service really makes sense because it drives people to buy prints – I think it would be hard to justify if all you were doing was letting people email the photos for free.
One of the other cool thing would be to give you access to photos from the actual event if you could prove that you were at the event. My pictures of fireworks always come out lousy and I’ve also been to several concerts where the shots you get with a point-and-shoot digial camera are not great.
Myron
Myron, I like the idea of creating temporary communities around people that were actually at an event, ties into Fred Stutzman’s idea of situational relevance (actually, I’m not sure that notion applied to social networks is Fred’s, but he’s the first one that I heard about it from).
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