Last Thursday my business participated with the national company Groupon to offer my services to customers at a massive discount. Like, over 90% in fact. Being that the offer is now complete, I thought I would share my initial reflections on the experience as a person and a businessman.

The images on the left are full size screen grabs of the offer and the comments section of the Groupon website.

It is too soon to really reflect much on my actual experience delivering such a bangin’ offer since I still have yet to actually go out and shoot any of these portrait sessions. But I have already interacted with many of my future portrait subjects who bought into the offer and I can say I’m very excited to see how this offer pans out for the future of my business.

For the offer, I worked with the Groupon representative/salesperson/somethingorother Emily. She was great. Always responding to emails and phone calls quickly. She even offered to answer questions on the comments page for me if I got too busy. I hope she got a healthy commission because she deserves it! (If you ever run a Groupon offer for your business, you should try and get her!)

Being fairly new in the world of business and marketing and having never leased much control over my customer relations to another company, I was anxious about how things would go. But Groupon made it easy and fun. Emily especially did a great job of making me feel comfortable with the whole ordeal. I’ve already recommended it to a number of business minded friends.

On the day of the offer I spent pretty much all day next to my computer answering questions via email, answering the phone and responding to comments on the Groupon website. It was busy, but exciting.

So far, the customers have been great. Four of the hundred and ninety-five portrait sessions have already been booked. One at Great Falls, two in Washington, DC and one hasn’t selected a location just yet. But I’m really excited to start shooting them. I’ve been working on building a (very) small team of photographers behind the scenes. I’m really looking foreword to using all these portrait sessions to deploy our collective talent.

The exposure, also, was invaluable. Thanks to Groupon’s model, I’ve already made a number of good contacts and potentially future wedding clients. And, my website spiked to nearly four thousand hits which has produced a pretty steady stream of phone calls from new and potential customers.

All-in-all, I highly recommend Groupon for businesses. So far, it’s a great experience. I have every intention of trying to run another offer next year. It’s also great for the customer. They get a great deal and an awesome opportunity to sample products and services that otherwise might cost them a lot of money.

Try it out!

Week four and I’m still video blogging. Between iMovie and a more relaxed attitude toward my video blog, I’m finding a weekly video to be pretty easy. Sooner or later, I’ll stop copping out of my Sunday blog posts by posting the video blog.

But for now, I’m still spreading the word. So, here you go, this week’s YouTube video blog.

(Can’t see the video? Watch it on YouTube!)

Above anything else, I’m a Christian. More important than any other aspect of my life is that God has given me grace in Jesus Christ. My life, in spite of all its imperfections, can never be the same. For all intents and purposes, I cannot divide my faith in Christ from any other aspect of my life. If my life were water, Jesus would be the spout that delivers it to my glass.In fact, Jesus would be the glass also.

But, along with that comes a challenging tension that I have not yet understood or learned to balance. Though I’ve heard quite a lot of ideas—none really seem to be the whole answer.

See, I am also an artist and a business man (if those two can indeed coexist). My art is photography, and my business is in the wedding and portrait industry. Both of these are highly social in nature. As a photographer, both artistically and professionally, my ‘survival’ relies on making and maintaining connections with people wherever I meet them. If those connections do not exist, neither can my business or my art.

But that is also true of my faith. I am called to be a witness to the world of God’s grace in my life. When I meet someone, speak to someone, engage with someone in virtually any capacity, this fact cannot, does not, escape my mind.

How do these two live in tension with one another? How do I run a business and create art that glorifies God without driving away those with whom I hope to engage? I have yet to hear a simple answer.

  Today, as I sat with friends, I learned for the first time how to use Twitter to grow my business. It’s a remarkable tool that puts you immediately in touch with a vast number of people talking about all kinds of interesting things. Of course, you probably knew that already. I admit, I’m joining the caravan a bit late.

After learning to use the networking tool, it took no time at all for me to discover that, here too, I would face this challenge. A major element of Twitter is simply connecting with people over everyday endeavors. Where you’re going, what you’re doing, who you’re reading.

For me, those things are almost always connected to, if not wrapped up in, my faith. If I use the tool as most do, then I keep a world of potential clients, and more importantly potential believers, at arms length. Much like wearing a t-shirt that says, “Beware, I’m a Christian”. At the end of that day I’m engaging only other Christians and doing business almost exclusively with them.

But, on the flip side, if I don’t vocalize the ins-and-outs of my faith, I essentially deny the very foundation of virtually everything I do.

It’s a conundrum to say the very, very least. I haven’t yet found a satisfying answer to these questions. But I’m eager to hear the thoughts of friends who find their own ways to strike this tension on a personal and professional basis every day.

Forgive me. I know this is no tech blog—or a business blog. I also know there’s nothing new about this trick. But, my annoyance with needlessly poor customer service in all kinds of different industries compels me to write something about this.

Did you know you can tell Google to ‘listen’ to the internet and notify you whenever someone, somewhere mentions your name? Or your company’s name? Or your neighbors dog? Whatever. They’re called ‘Google Alerts’ and anyone can set them up.

Here’s how.

1. Go to http://www.google.com/alerts.

This will appear on the right side of the screen.

2. Fill in the ‘search terms’ box. Any Google search will do. Including all the standard tricks and operations.

2a. If you like, search only a specific site. Type your search in as normal. Then, add a space followed by ‘Site:’ then without a space, type the site you’d like to search. (example: “William Petruzzo site:blogspot.com”; using this in your Google alert would send you an email every time someone mentioned William Petruzzo on a blog hosted at Blogspot).

2b. If you like, select sites you would like to exclude. Type your search as normal. Then, add a space followed by ‘-site:’. Then, without spaces, type the site you’d like to exclude from searching. (example: “William Petruzzo –site:petruzzo.com”. Using this in your Google alert would send you an email every time someone mentions William Petruzzo anywhere except on my site, Petruzzo.com).

3. Choose the types of sites you want Google to ‘listen to’. It’s pretty self explanatory. You can choose from News, Blogs, Web, Videos, Groups and Comprehensive (searches everything).

4. Choose how many results you’d like in each email. Again, self explanatory. Either 20 or 50. More than that, and you’ll get multiple emails.

5. Select the email you’d like Google to send results to. Just type your email. If you have a Google Google account, then login and choose your email address from the list.

6. Press ‘Create Alert’ and respond to the email. Google will send you an email asking you to verify the alert. Follow those instructions and you’re good to go.

In Conclusion

So, if you’ve found yourself reading this. You might decide to use this to eavesdrop on your friends on MySpace. But if you’re a business owner, or salesperson, you might (wisely) use this to keep track of how people are responding to you or your business on blogs and forums and twitter and just about everything else.

This will give you the chance to respond to complains or compliments within minutes, even when they don’t approach you directly. But most importantly, it might, just might, help chip away at all the crappy customer service assaulting me all the time!

Reward good and honest business with business!

I took a self evaluation test today to help develop some observations about my professional habits as a photographer. Here is a short excerpt from the feedback it provided:

“Stay conscious about your attitude. Ask yourself often (even now) what is ruling your heart. Is your good or bad day being determined by things outside of you or by your own decisions? This is a question you need to place at the forefront of your mind until it becomes your default habit.”

Of course, this is talking about my career. But it’s eerily applicable to my day in day out walk with the Lord.

And it does need to be placed ‘at the forefront’ of my mind everyday.

A few days ago I wrote about the changing landscape of business and education thanks to the availability of information and the unprecedented level of connectedness we have to that information. Well, I just watched an incredibly interesting video on YouTube which details some of the numbers and figures that make those speculations all the more compelling.

Check it out.

Can’t see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

A couple days ago I started reading a book by photographer Dane Sanders called Fast Track Photographer. The book attempts to help photographers better grasp the current climate of the photography industry.

While discussing education, especially as it applies to photography, he had this to say:

“In the era that’s quickly vanishing in our rear-view mirror, most of us defined professionalism based largely on time—how much time you spent paying your dues (historical time) and how much time you currently spend working [as a professional] (present time). Time was the defining element, and time used to be a reasonable measuring stick. But it isn’t anymore. Again, learning curves have flattened, due to new [technology] new software and new learning opportunities, among other things. It doesn’t take as long to go pro as it used to.”

Of course, Sanders is talking about going from amateur to professional photographer. As he describes, what it takes to become a professional is not what it used to be. Not necessarily less, just different.

But photography is based heavily on technology. It becomes an industry right on the edge of change. Among industries that change dramatically with technology, photography is high on that list. But as history has shown us, there is virtually no industry that is untouched by the technological advances of the last 30-40 years.

This has all gotten me thinking about the state of education and employment in general.

Photography, an industry that remains close to the cutting edge, has already almost completed an important shift: a photography degree doesn’t do too much for you as a pro. Many pros have no formal education at all. Learning mostly from the wealth of information on the internet, and their own hands-on experience.

The shift is starting to happen in other industries also. Hollywood has more “untrained” people than ever before. It’s also more more common for people to get hired as computer techs with no degree than it ever was before. Marketing, politics, sales, even religion, have an uncanny number of folk-professionals working in them.

It makes me wonder if the same shift that has happened in the photographic industry will happen in most other industries. In order to be hired, will mechanics need to go to trade school, or simply demonstrate the competency they gained from private learning? And, if things do pan out that way, what will that mean for our higher learning institutions? After all, with discipline and hard work, there’s virtually nothing to learn in a university that can’t be learned from lots of intuitive Google searches.

We live in an exciting time. It seems plausible to me that if technology keeps moving as fast as it has, there might be some folks with some very expensive, yet ultimately useless, degrees.