Archive for November, 2010

Does Facebook Own Your Images?

Monday, November 29th, 2010

Many artists are creating or expanding their Internet presence by setting up a Facebook (fan) Page.  If you are promoting your art as a business, the Facebook Page (vs personal Profile) is where to do it. Over the last few months a number of artists have told me they had some concerns about using Facebook to promote their art.  They had heard if you put images on Facebook,   Facebook assumes ownership of them.  Of course, as an artist, you would be posting images of your work.  By doing so, are you losing control?

First, let’s go straight to the horse’s mouth.  Here is an excerpt from the Facebook Help Centre FAQs:

Do I retain the copyright and other legal rights to material I upload to Facebook?

Yes, you retain the copyright to your content. When you upload your content, you grant us a license to use and display that content. For more information please visit our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which contain information about intellectual property, as well as your privileges and responsibilities as a Facebook user.

Taking the referenced link we find:

2. Sharing Your Content and Information

You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition:

  1. For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

So Facebook  does not claim ownership but that you grant them license to use whatever they choose without compensation or acknowledgement.  Would Facebook grab your images and sell them on boxed Christmas cards?  I think not.   In fact, Facebook’s license only permits it to use user content “in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof,”  indicating that they do not plan to make the site profitable by selling giclees of your work on Ebay.

The policy is consistent with other services. For example when you post a video on YouTube  will find a statement in their Terms of Service which is almost identical.  Apparently these policies are only in place to prevent nuisance law suits.   If they did use your  images in a way that was deemed inappropriate, there would be a backlash that would not be in Facebook’s interests.

Facebook is growing at a phenomenal rate and it offers great opportunity for exposure for artists.  I don’t think you should let the Terms of Service scare you off.

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Posted in Legal, Marketing Venues | 5 Comments »

The Fuzzy World of Search Engines

Thursday, November 18th, 2010

If people want to find your art website, and they key your name into a search engine, chances are good they will find you.  But wouldn’t it be great if people discovered you by keying in the type of art they are looking for?  Let’s face it,  most people in the world do not know your name!   So how can an artist increase the changes of being found when the searcher does not know the artist’s name?   The answer lies in understanding how search engines index content, and that is fuzzy territory since those methods are always changing.

Recently Deb Kirk asked if putting underscores between the words in Alt tags would increase search engine visibility.   I performed the following test:

I googled “algonquin park painting”,  “algonquin_park_painting”, and “algonquinparkpainting”,  clearing my history before each search.  All searches returned 59,400 search results, but when I googled “algonquin-park-painting” and got 64,700 results!   This would suggest that underscores between the words produce no advantage, but dashes might. Artist Joseph Pearce  managed to be rated #1 on the 59,400 results.  Looking at the HTML code for his homepage (Click View-  Source,  in Internet Explorer)  reveals more.  Nowhere in the code do you find an Alt tag with the words “algonquin park painting”, “algonquin_park_painting”, or “algonquinparkpainting”!      You will find the individual words scattered throughout the page however, which means that Google is clever enough to map the overall page content to my search words.  
 

    

Morning on Opeongo Lake by Joseph Pearce  24″ x 48″

I asked Dave Achtemichuk, a software developer who has created an online service for art organizations and artists called ArtistQuarter to explain these results.

“In the specific example you mentioned, different punctuation gets different results, I guess because it processes the search in slightly different ways. With dashes, it might first try to find hyphenated words that match your query, and when it doesn’t find any, it looks deeper and separates the query into the individual words. When you type the words all together as one string, it probably does the same thing– first tries to search for the single word, then intelligently breaking it up into its component words and re-runs the search to get the proper results (also note that capitalization has no effect on the searches). This is also how Google can give the proper desired results even if you spell a word wrong in your query.   I believe that what is indexed is not affected by the punctuation– just how you enter your search term determines what subset of the indexed data is used. The indexing seems to use the same fuzzy approach to infer meaning and component words regardless of what punctuation is entered.  It may have been that at one point years ago, adding dashes to ALT text had some effect on searchability.  However, the searching algorithms have gotten more and more ‘fuzzy’ and punctuation is often ignored.”

“Google releases a new indexing mechanism every few months on average, after which old SEO methods can become irrelevant. Given Google publishes very scant information on how their indexing methods work, it’s mostly trial-and-error.  There’s lots of books and tutorials about SEO out there, but most are outdated. Even those that aren’t too outdated involve a lot of guesswork.  Modern-day SEO  is largely founded on hunches rather than hard data.”

“Google Image Search is a good example of how intelligent the searching has become– you can search by topic and even if that text only appears NEAR the image as text, the image is still shown as a result. Google is smart enough to infer captions and descriptive text related to an image in the content.”

“There are a few core concepts to SEO when trying to optimize for a certain search term or search terms:

1.  Provide relevant (text) content
2. Update that content whenever possible to improve ranking. Updating the front page with the latest news of your artist site remains a good thing to do to get strong rankings.
3. Have other people link to your content from their own content (but only when the link is coming from a page with related content).

The basic point being that as along as your pages have words that describe what they’re about, they should be indexed by the search engines and come up ordered by their relevance to the specific search term.  Search engines are now very good at determining the true relevance of pages to the search terms, even at a very abstract level– very little has to be spelled out for their benefit.”

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Posted in Artist Websites, Increasing Traffic | 1 Comment »

It’s New and Free!

Wednesday, November 10th, 2010

It’s been said that the words “new” and “free” are the most powerful words in advertising.  And there they are together in the title of this article.  Admit it, you were a little hooked by the title weren’t you?  People love to get things for free.  When someone offers something for free many people are moved to action.  They like to get somethin’  for nuttin’.  That could work to your advantage when you are trying to promote your art.

For example,  artist Janet Nelson has a blog called A Planet Named Janet.  She grows blog followers  by regularly offering a draw for free original art. She has been giving away her art since the spring of 2009.  She offers a couple 5 x 7 acrylic paintings at a time.  Rules are simple. Visitors leave a separate comment for each painting they would like to win and they can enter as often as they like within a 2 week period.  Janet numbers the comments and uses a random number generator and pick the winners.  Janet even ships for free. She  considered giving away a variety of artwork in stock just to reduce inventory.  Instead she chose to encourage collecting by offering similar paintings as part of a series.   The series features a pair of items (2 peaches, 2 birds etc) painted on 5 x 7 backer boards. Winners also receive a blank notecard of the same image which she hopes will be sent to someone else.

As a result of the give-aways, her blog followers have doubled.  In addition, some winners have blogged about it. To produce that result she discovered that it was necessary to promote the giveaway, which she did on Facebook, Twitter and Etsy.  Unlike some other Etsy giveways, she made entry simple: just leave a comment.  Some artists require entrants to become followers to enter.

Janet also has a weekly give-away at a gallery where she is represented.  This has resulted in “a large fishbowl of entrants” whose e-mail address will be a valuable asset for marketing.

Other artists who have achieved a high level of exposure also use giveaways. Over 1800 people have joined the Facebook group, d’art Lottery for a weekly chance to win a piece of art by Val’s Art Diary.

I, myself  tried a little experiment on this blog last month.  I offered a chance for a  free  website analysis with every comment posted during October.   I was curious to see if the offer would encourage people to make more comments.  It did.  The average  number of comments per article jumped from 1 to 9.  Significant.  That does not include people who commented by e-mail.  Adding in those comments,  the comments per article jumped from 1 to 16!  The other interesting thing that happened was  a conversation among artists began.  I like that.  I see this blog as a place where artists can share their experiences and ideas about marketing online.  I encourage you to engage in the converations.

And the winner of the free website analysis is………. Ron Vickers!

Posted in Blogging, Increasing Traffic, Success Stories, Uncategorized, Your Art Offerings | 1 Comment »