A Trip without a Map

As many of you already know, I am very involved with the Association of Professional Landscape Designers (APLD), as its International Membership chair, and this past weekend I was in Chicago for their 2nd annual Chapter Symposium. At that meeting I was responsible for presenting state and regional chapter leaders with ideas to retain and recruit chapter members.

Things got really interesting when I presented Social Media opportunities. Energy, confusion, disbelief and social media evangelism mingled together in the room. I realized that I had with a simple PowerPoint presentation taken the group into unknown and virtually unexplored territory. I had, along with my own experiments in the past several months, established, managed or embellished APLD's social media presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, Land8lounge, Landscapedia, and Twitter. Just like starting a new landscape design, these savvy design professionals needed a 'site' map to follow to achieve their goals.

I contacted social media PR professional, Jessie Newburn, from Nemetschek North America to see if we could use social media jointly to promote an event that APLDNJ had planned to demonstrate their Vectorworks Landmark CAD program to New Jersey chapter members.

We established an extremely fluid and organic (read highly experimental) social media marketing plan which will unfold during the next week prior to the March 3rd event which is currently full with a waiting list. Hopefully, in addition to creating a format for sharing the event, the end game will be a base map that others can use and build on--we're navigating new territory and exploring the possibilities. You can follow the progress and see it unfold over the next week here.

My Friend Flickr

I’ve been updating and redesigning the 2009 edition of my design portfolio. I needed to edit some images beyond the abilities of my very basic photo editor and I have absolutely no patience when it comes to photo programs. I wanted something simple, free and immediate, so I Googled ‘free photo editing program’ to see what was available and was directed to Picnik, which in turn lead me to Flickr. It was serendipity--I was able to continue with my Web 2.0 adventures and organize, edit, upload and share my images as another arm of my social media experience.

I’m not be the most organized when it comes to cataloging my images and I have amassed hundreds of photos over the years. Like many other landscape designers, the beauty shots of my work have to be taken during the height of the design/build season when gardens look their best. I usually don’t have the time or energy to catalog them immediately—I’m too busy running around hither and yon in May and June to do that too!

Now five years old and owned by Yahoo, Flickr can make a single image or group viewable by the entire web, to a pre-designated group(s) of viewers or to no one else but me. I am in the process of cataloging all of my images and uploading them in groups. It's a great project for the winter and will make it easy to direct a potential client to more than is presented in my portfolio CD.

Even though, Flickr makes image organization and editing a snap, what I think is really useful is the other ways I've started to use it. Right now all of my photos are available to everyone, but there are times when I want to make individual images available to specific people for a purpose. I can notate a photo explaining to the viewer what it is I want them to see. Here’s an example--the photo is unremarkable in every way and not something I would use for a portfolio piece; but when the notes are added it becomes a valuable tool for communicating with a client.
Click here.



Flicker enables me to create of sets of photos which I stream or upload to other websites, communities and within my own social media pages. Play with Flickr and see what it can do. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then Flickr makes them worth even more.