Getting potential customers to your Web shop is just half the battle. The other challenge is delivering compelling content to them once they are there. A bunch of static photos certainly won't do the trick, especially for e-tailers with visually-based products or services, but most small businesses don't have the expertise or resources to deploy a host of interactive Flash-based animations to liven things up.
Besides, Flash is generally ignored by search engines, which are designed primarily to index HTML text. So, what's a Web shop owner to do to add some pop to their product displays?
Show and Sell: The program's Home Classified style incorporates listing data into a slick slideshow you can share with prospective clients.
PhotoShow 5, from Simple Star, can help. You may already be familiar with PhotoShow, as this media-sharing platform has been used for years by the likes of Kodak and HP SnapFish to deliver photo slideshows to customers.
Small businesses can leverage the power to deliver their own multimedia shows, whether as embedded slide shows at your online store, distributed via e-mail or burned to CD or DVD for distribution. PhotoShow is ideal for realtors, online power sellers, travel agents — any business that deals in things that are visual in nature.
Partner Up Yet Stand Out
You can be a team player, but still shine as your own brand. The benefits of leveraging the brand-recognition and resources of a large company through a joint-venture are fairly obvious for small businesses as they launch, and eventually, grow. But often, the small-fry gets overshadowed by the big fish, and SimpleStar CEO Chad Richard was aware of this, but still wanted to forge relationships with big companies in the marketplace.
Even though SimpleStar was a startup with a fledgling product, Richard was insistent that the company wouldn't lose its identity as it sought partnerships with heavy-hitters in the industry, such as Kodak, Walgreen's, Shutterfly, Comcast and others. But it wasn't always easy to maintain its individual identity.
"We view PhotoShow as a standard media type, like a QuickTime," Richard says. "Maintaining the branding of the media format has been core to our corporate DNA." He has three pieces of advice to small companies looking to partner up without losing their own identity in the process.
1. Be Pragmatic "We went with a somewhat vanilla, but descriptive brand name," he says of PhotoShow. That way, partners wouldn't feel uncomfortable using it along with their own branding (as in Kodak PhotoShow, Comcast PhotoShow Deluxe, and so on). But if they had named the platform something outlandish (say, Purple32), that would have been a tougher sell.
2. Communicate Up Front Richard also advises to communicate the requirement that your brand be used up front, so there are no surprises. "There we were in our first meeting with Kodak, a company with 130 years of branding in consumer photography, talking about our 2-year-old company's brand," he recalls. But he effectively communicated his vision for the PhotoShow platform, and Kodak agreed.
3. Don't Cave When one of the major online photo finishers wanted to replace the PhotoShow name with one of its own choosing, Richard balked. "We had to be prepared to walk away from deals, and in fact we did," he says. If including your brand is a requirement, make sure it is a requirement for all partners. Otherwise, some will feel others got a better deal, and you won't have the clout to make the demand of others down the line.
Show Off Your Stuff That's what attracted Andrew Robinson, a real estate professional with Home Investment Realty in Kissimmee, Fla. He and partner Richard Rodney launched OrlandoHomeCenter.com to showcase properties in the Orlando-Kissimmee-St. Cloud-Poinciana area. Problem was, photo-laden e-mails to clients would often bounce back, either because the attachments put the e-mail over the size limit allowed by the recipient's ISP, or because the mail system would block incoming JPEGs because of their potential to harbor malware.
So, on the advice of a friend, Robinson tried SimpleStar's free online service, PhotoShow.com, to send the photos instead. The slideshows, complete with music and captions, were such a big hit with prospective clients that he began posting hot properties on the free Web site all PhotoShow members can use to post and share their shows. One slideshow has been viewed more than 1,400 times, and Robinson has found the multimedia presentations to be much more effective marketing tools than the standard half-dozen or so static images you'll find on a typical realty site.
Simple Setup for your Big Show Getting started with PhotoShow is exceedingly easy. You can use the free online version to build and share your shows, or opt for the more feature-rich desktop software ($39.99). We tested the latter. The program installs in just minutes, and during setup automatically catalogs the photos and video clips you already have on your hard drive.
PhotoShow enables you to embed the HTML code directly into an auction-site listing, Web store page or blog so it's easy to create customized multi-media marketing without having to tackle advanced Web development tools.
The clean, tab-driven user interface is easy to navigate without instruction. Simply click on the large "Make a PhotoShow" button and the main working screen appears, with a list of your photo folders on the left and the thumbnail view of the photos in that folder on the right. You can also view your collection by date, tags, and so on, or choose among the PhotoShows you've already created or received.
Point and Shoot: Building a PhotoShow is as simple as selecting photos from the thumbnail list and choosing a style.
Simply click on the thumbnails of the photos to include in the new photo show, name it, pick a style (there are 88 to choose from), add comments and keywords, and you're done. The show will include transitions and even licensed music (a big consideration for marketing pieces, so as not to run afoul of anyone's copyrights).
You can easily add more photos to a show you've already made or edit other attributes, like the style, song, credits screen, and so on. Creating a show takes so little time that it's easy to try a bunch of styles to get the tone just right, an important nuance for marketing your site. After all, if your Web shop design conveys a serene feeling, you don't want honky-tonk background music.
The default styles include a range of slideshow types, plus themes (elegant, baby, pop art, seasons and so on), events and holidays, (formal wedding, informal, birthday, graduation, and more), music video styles and classifieds (home, car) with several subtypes.
Once you are finished building a show, in addition to using it in your auctions or at your e-store, you can e-mail it, print the photos (either from your own printer, or order professional prints from SimpleStar), order a customized DVD (complete with artwork on the DVD case) or create your own CD or DVD for TV playback on a DVD player or on a PC.
So if you're searching for a way to spice up your online marketing collateral but have no interest in becoming a programmer, give PhotoShow a try. Once you see how quick it is to get impressive results, you'll wonder how you got along without it.
Jamie Bsales is an award-winning technology writer and editor with nearly 14 years of experience covering the latest hardware, software and Internet products and services.
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