Capture, Shape, and Share with Instagram
February 07, 2013 Kathleen

(If you’re reading this post through an RSS feed or email be sure to click through to watch the video.) 

You guys may already know that we’re huge fans of Instagram. But lately we’ve found ourselves recommending it more and more to our creative entrepreneur clients. Instagram is an awesome way to visually connect with your friends, network with potential dream customers or brand advocates, and “show your tell”. But it’s also a great way capture, shape, and share who you are, and what you do – in a consistent, curated, behind-the-scenes of your life and work kind of way. 

Instagram is great for creatives like life coaches and consultants who aren’t necessarily photographers or designers, but still want to show of their goods, and their personal brand in a visual way, and look good doing it.

So this is how I, myself, and Braid’s creative entrepreneur clients, are using Instagram to capture, shape and share their business and personal brand. Now “capture, shape and share” is a three step approach I talk about a lot, especially when it comes to my blogging strategy (for both my personal blog and the Braid blog.) But really, you can just as easily overlay those three principles to a platform like Instagram – like a microblog approach I mention below (but with less writer’s block). 

Capture Instagram

CAPTURE
• Capture the Details: Instagram gets me thinking about capturing the small brand experiences I encounter – from a hand stamped placemat in my favorite restaurant to the way a lemon rind and oversized ice cube sits in my whiskey. 
• Capture Inspiration: Instagram is a great tool for visual note taking on the fly. For example, I’ve used Instagram to scout locations and capture test shots for brand videos.  
• Capture the Process: Instagram is an awesome way to share the behind-the-scenes process and tools you use to create for your clients. 

Shape Instagram

SHAPE
• Shape the Image: One of the things I love about Instagram is the ability to actually shape the final photograph with different filters (though, I prefer “rise”) and tilt-shift blur options. I also like to go in and add typographic overlays or multiply color over my images in Photoshop when taking my Instagram photos to my blog. But even if you’re not a graphic designer, filtering your images through Instagram is a great way to create consistency with the images you’re sharing. 
• Shape your Point-of-View: Go through your entire collection of Instagram snaps and start to find patterns. What colors do you capture a lot? What subjects? Do you consistently shoot from a certain angle or point-of-view? You’ll notice that the Instagram with the most followers (like one of my favorites, A Merry Mishap) have a consistent point-of-view. 
• Shape the Story: You can include a description with your Instagram images and treat it almost like a daily microblog. I often use Instagram to capture images I will later craft an in-depth blog post around later.  

Share Instagram

SHARE 
• Share on Instagram: One of the things I like about Instagram (vs. other camera apps like Hipstamatic – which are awesome for photo editing, as well) is the built in community designed for sharing. Just like Twitter you can explore hashtagged topics – one of my favorites is #WHP. #WHP stands for “Weekend Hashtag Project” where Instagram challenges users to capture a topic or theme like “birds on a wire” or “from where I stand” and tag it. It’s so cool to see what everyone else comes up with. Check out Instagram’s blog or follow @Instagram for interesting users and hashtags to follow and participate in. 
•  Share Elsewhere: You can also send your Instagram photos out to Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr as you post them to your Instagram feed. This is a great way to flood all your social media platforms with beautiful, and consistent, images that share you and your brand. Different audiences may be following you in different places but you can add more information or tidbits to avoid becoming redundant if you find you have the same followers across your social media platforms. 
• Share in Real Life: One of my favorite new companies, Artifact Uprising, is designed to easily get your photos m your phone to print books and calendars. You can also use Pinstagr.am for miniprints, posters, and stickers. You can decorate your office or use these prints as self-promotional materials to send to your favorite dream customers. 

Are you using Instagram to capture, shape, and share your business and personal brand? Let us know your Instagram tips, advice, or insights on our Facebook page. P.S. You can follow my Instagram account here. 

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Our Braid ECourse Personal Branding: Blending Who You Are With What You Do is open for registration until February 14th. This $75 ECourse has 3 lessons loaded with tips, advice and our philosophy on defining your personal brand, thriving in the overlap between personal and professional, and sharing that brand online and off. All of that content, including worksheets and videos, will be available to you while the course is in-session from Feb. 15th - 24th. Register and find out more here.

Braid How-To's, Videos
How Are You Showing Your Tell?
January 08, 2013 Liz

Liz here. We definitely have word-weaving and message-crafting on the brain at Braid this week. A lot to do with the second offering of the Braid ECourse: "Shape Up Your Content: Tame Your Ideas and Tell People How to Buy You." So why have Tara and Kathleen asked me to share my point-of-view and perhaps a few helpful pointers for creatives on sharing content through visuals – as opposed to only the written word? Well, I can certainly appreciate (and aspire to create) simple, memorable statements in lieu of those daunting “one thousand words” when it makes sense to do so. And, this shouldn’t really come as a surprise, but some enrollees of the messaging-focused Ecourse last time around, requested a little more insight into shaping their image-based content (the ECourse itself peppered with infographics, photos, and videos).

For visual people, sometimes it just makes more sense to share images more often than words. You can usually articulate something – a feeling, a sense of place, a moment in time –  that words would only begin to describe. Plus writing is hard! Sometimes “the telling” can feel contrived coming from someone who could nail the same sentiment with a single, well-art-directed image (or a quick candid video, or a tricked-out infographic).  What are some ways to create a consistency over time with those images that clues people into the fact that this content is coming from... you?

If your strengths translate better through visual content, the goal here is to make sure that visual content is consistent. Whether you're sharing your gifts of knowledge with followers, or sharing your creative process with potential clients, consistency helps create a bridge between those beautiful images you're showing and the beautiful ideas behind them. It also builds trust – once you start to define and maintain a consistent visual sharing style, followers will start to equate your type treatment / favorite color and texture combo / Instagram filter with your brilliant brilliance (overt redundancy! – yet another trick of the visual-thinker-turned-writer). 

Chances are, you already have a defined visual style, you maybe just don't think of it that way. But you definitely have a natural tendency to look at things a certain way. Think back to some of your favorite photographs or images:
- Do you always zoom in super-close with your camera, to capture details? 
- Are your favorite photos birds-eye view? 
- Do you frame everything consciously centered and balanced, or asymmetrical?
- Does everything look better in black and white to you? 
- Are you drawn to all things vibrant and saturated?
- Is everything always perfectly in focus (or perfectly out-of-focus)?
- Do you keep returning to a particular typeface, or color, or texture?

Find a few overarching themes, and see if any of them can combine to create a style that's authentically you. Culling a style from what you’re already drawn to and capturing is also an easy way to assure that you’ll keep creating this kind of content in the future. 

Braid's visual system evolved from Kathleen's blog - most specifically, how she shared her life-changing trip to Nepal. Her “bold yellow or white type and graphics overlaid on travel photography” style morphed into Braid’s “bold yellow or white type and graphics overlaid on one well-loved chalkboard wall” style. It's simple, it's straightforward, and its become an absolutely essential piece of our content-sharing puzzle. We use it across every platform we share on - our blog posts, in our ECourses, and on our Facebook wall - so you always know Braid content the moment you see it. 

Typography

Texture

Graphics

Photography

Your visual consistency should also carry over to platforms other than your blog. Instagram is a great way for visual people (especially photographers and stylists) to showcase their eye. 

Photographer Jason Hudson wrote about a great guide for creating lovely, personal-brand-solidifying consistency on Instagram here. One tip is to limit yourself to one filter (Jason prefers the moody, desaturated Brannan), so that regardless of what you're capturing, all your images will have a similar tone and palette. It's an easy way to stay consistent without having to think about it constantly. 

Did you know, for example, that Kathleen exclusively uses the Rise filter on her Instagram? I didn't, until recently. It gives everything she posts this kind of soft, early-morning zen glow, and tints everything with a little bit of the yellow that’s so prevalent on her blog. I feel like a kid in a vintage-filter candy store every time I go to post something – so I'm impressed by her ability to limit herself to just one filter. Consistent!

Okay, but if the idea of getting your words equally consistent still appeals to you, we’re gonna agree: the pairing of the visual with the verbal is really going to really give you the greatest content memorability. 

So, of course Tara and Kathleen would want me to mention our Braid ECourse “Shape Up Your Content: Tame Your Ideas and Tell People How to Buy You” is only open for registration through end of day Thursday and is in session January 11-20! It’s designed to help creative professionals, bloggers, entrepreneurs and aspiring-to-be’s wrap their head around all their ideas, focus on the ones that are content-worthy, weed out the ones that cause distraction and confusion – and make what they are writing and saying less generic, more authentic, and supportive of their actual vision for themselves and their creative business (whether they’re showing or telling). Go here to register and learn more.

Braid How-To's
Are You A Hot Spark or A Slow Burn?
October 25, 2012 Tara

When it comes to making an impression in people’s hearts and minds, are you a hot spark or a slow burn? This is a topic Kathleen and I have talked about lots of times in the past. We’ve actually called it “fast burn” versus “slow burn” in our conversations – and I suppose it’s a type of people-chemistry. It applies to your relationships with friends, acquaintances, and in the case of being in business for yourself, it applies to your personal brand.

I have always considered Kathleen’s style as a hot spark (rather than a fast burn, which implies something that dies out.) A hot spark makes a quick brilliant flash of an impression with the potential to turn into something more.  The point is, that the flash is what gets your attention, burns into your retinas, and makes you memorable.

Hot Spark vs Slow Burn

I’m going to go out on a limb and make an assumption here. I think Kathleen and I will discover next week, when our Braid ECourse: Personal Branding begins, that most of the enrollees are cultivating their personal brand because of a specific interest in blogging, and a desire to convey their personal + professional selves in the most memorable way.  I would venture even further to guess that many of them (and you) are already “hot sparks.”

I, on the other hand, am a slow burn. Yes, being aware that I’m portraying a consistent personal brand is partly about my online persona since I am actively writing to you here, blogging on Braid Creative, and sharing a lot of myself and my experience with an online audience.  But where I feel like my personal brand comes the most into play, as it does with so many slow burns, is in the way I work with others, how they remember me over time, and then become “loyal fans” based on that experience.

“But anyone can make an impression over time, based on back-and-forth experience!” you say (okay, I say). “That doesn’t apply when making a first impression!” (you and I both conclude). And that’s what the crux of this letter is about. How are you making yourself memorable in a short time span – like in a prospective client chat or in the first blog post someone reads by you – if you’re a slow burn?  For that matter, if you’re of the bright-and-instantaneous hot spark persuasion, how do you avoid being just a flash in the pan?

How to Sustain The Spark & Speed Up The Slow Burn
Okay, this subhead cracks me up and gives me the creeps at the same time, because up until just this week, as a matter of fact, we’ve been listening to the free version of Spotify in our office. Which means our music is interrupted by an ad every ten minutes or so. And this one advertisement comes up at least twice an hour, for some enhancement cream or some such product, in this Guy Smiley radio-announcer voice – to “speed her up... and slow him down.” Needless to say, after hearing this ad for the fiftieth time we finally just took the time to subscribe to the ten dollar a month no-ad version of Spotify.  

But obviously it crept into my subconscious. Sorry. Here’s what I actually mean:

Spark Sustain

Hot Sparks Tend To:
• Create Bold Statements (visual & verbal)
• Make Quick Decisions (perhaps results are varying, but the act of taking charge in itself is awesome and appreciated)

Making The Spark Last Over Time By Being Consistent:
Keep doing what you’re doing. Keep making bold statements with your style of clothes and your say-what-you-mean statements. Just do it consistently. From clothes to copy, the statements will change along with the opinion and styles, but keep making them loud, clear and in your voice. Be known for being a decision-maker! Everyone knows that not every decision is always going to end up just-right. Your results might not always be reliable, but people will still rely on you to be the person gutsy enough to make the call.

Slow Burn

Slow Burns Typically:
• Create Sense Out of Chaos (methodically build stories & connect the dots)
• Take Rational Steps (perhaps waters down the instant impact, but decisions are always thoughtful and well-rounded)

Speed Up The Burn By Embracing Your Character
Who is going to be “wowed” by process and methodology? Well, you’d be surprised. If you can present your rational, logical approach in a lively, colorful way either in conversation or through writing or images it will be memorable. It may not be a “wow-pow” like with the hot sparks, but you will draw them in all the same. As long as you inject personality. For me, that’s storytelling and humor paired with a “here-are-the-steps” approach. I can actually say to someone “I’m a process-oriented person, but I also tell really amazing stories.”  I have also worked with some uber-geeks who have seriously won over the hearts and minds of others in just a five minute presentation, or first-meet, or blog post, just by embracing their geekiness and speaking in earnest about what they really know.

Which are you, a hot spark or a slow burn? Tell us on Facebook.  

And, if you haven’t checked out our Braid ECourse: Personal Branding Blending Who You Are With What You Do, starting October 29th, there are still a just few more days to enroll. (Okay, let me rephrase, if you are hot-sparky you probably clicked on it the moment you saw the words “personal brand.” But you slow-burners might weigh the rational pro’s and con’s of taking this ECourse and learning more.)

Braid ECourses, Braid How-To's, Personal Branding