Announcement posted by
Polite In Public Pty Ltd
01 Aug 2012
Joshua Phillips is the Director of Polite in Public –
a new breed of social marketing company that equips brands with the tools to
tell stories over social networks via branded photos. A Sydney University Media
Graduate and former Senior Public Relations Consultant to Bank of America in
New York, Josh believes companies have become modern-day storytellers.
“When Facebook introduced Timeline earlier this year,
they made a pretty clear statement to their 800 million users – your life story
will now be told primarily with photos. Users were not given a choice. That’s
probably the same reason they bought Instagram – photos have become the most
valuable, persuasive and sought-after real estate on social networks.”
Facebook seems to back up this sentiment - in their
very own Best Practice and Media Strategy
page, it implores brands to use images in their storytelling because they have
an engagement rate 180 per cent higher than an average post. According to
Phillips, this makes perfect sense.
“The facts on social media and photos are pretty
straightforward. Firstly, you have this immense number of photos being uploaded
to social networks every day – around 250 million on Facebook alone. Second,
you have these photos actually driving traffic to sites – with something like
30% of Facebook photos generating referral traffic to outside websites. Even in
their infancy photo-based sites like Pinterest are actually ahead of Google +
and LinkedIn when it comes to referring traffic - with around 4% referral
rates. For corporate clients – this presents an opportunity to drive traffic
via a branded image – and that’s where we come in.”
One of the ways companies like MasterCard, Coca-Cola
and ANZ are telling their own ‘stories’ is by using Polite In Public photo booths on-site at their events. For around
$3,000 a brand can engage Polite In Public to set up a social media photo booth
and breach the divide between the real and online worlds – sharing instantly
branded content organically via social media. Polite In Public photo booths not
only take images, they airbrush them instantly and place branding such as logos
and special graphic effects on the photos – the idea being that people are more
likely to share airbrushed images where they look great – rather than standard,
raw images where they look ordinary. According to Phillips, this move into
photo sharing on-site at events is symptomatic of a larger shift in the social
media milieu and points to an inextricable relationship between storytelling
and sales.
“Advertising was once about telling consumers what to
do – now it’s about saying ‘we did this together’. It’s about building stories
and getting customers or ‘fans’ to engage – to listen. I wouldn’t necessarily
say companies want to control the narrative, but they certainly want to have
their story told – and a picture tells a thousand words.”
Polite in Public has offices in Sydney, New York and
Los Angeles.
