The fun of my career these days is the variety of projects I’m working on every week and this past week was no exception.   It started with getting the word out on the 50% off discount to WPPI next year for Skip’s Summer School attendees.  Then came a few new blogs on GoingPro2010 and a new podcast soon to launch.  GhostRighters jumped in with some interesting future projects and a couple of webinars on marketing in June.  And I finished, working on PDN’s Virtual Trade show coming up at the end of this month.  Definitely circle the dates on this FREE event – better yet, take two minutes right now and register!

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PDN’s Virtual Event:  In addition to the trade show component, there are ten outstanding webinars, all free and all running about 30-40 minutes.  The ones I’ve been involved in doing so far have been outstanding.  Suzan Moody on SEO/SEM 101 for Wedding and Portrait Photographers, Judy Host on turning your images into Masterpieces, Laura Novak on branding and identifying your niche and Catherine Hall on relationship building leading into niche marketing.  Each webinar is going to offer a wealth of information and ideas you can implement immediately.

 This year’s full lineup includes (alphabetical order by day) on May 24, Skip Cohen (me), Doug Gordon, Gene Ho, Suzan Moody and Laura Novak interviewed by Dane Sanders. On May 25 you’ll hear Jim Garner, Jeff and Allison Rogers with Lisa Rodwell, Judy Host, Allen Murabayashi and Catherine Hall.

One of the amazing things about our industry is how you can be great friends with somebody and never really know how good they are at presenting a concept.  Yesterday I was involved in working on two of the webinars, Laura Novak and Catherine Hall.  I’ve known both photographers for a long time, but never really knew their presentation style or for that matter their message.

Laura brought in Dane Sanders and presented some outstanding concepts to help you think through how to build your brand, your mission statement and then an overall philosophy to keep it all growing.  Catherine, brought her experience in niche marketing with idea after idea on building your relationship with your clients, which opens the door for developing a strategy for targeting the high-end bride.

Both programs are a kick, but what hit me the hardest was that both have their success deeply rooted in relationship building.  We all talk about its importance.  I’ve written page after page talking about relationships with sponsors, clients and other photographers.  If you think about it, the true definition of Customer Service is just more relationship building.

I found a couple of quotes this morning that definitely hit the concept better than I can…

From Gandhi: A customer is the most important visitor on our premises, he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.

And from the other side of capitalism, Ray Kroc,the founder of MacDonalds:

If you work just for money, you’ll never make it, but if you love what you’re doing and you always put the customer first, success will be yours.

Happy Friday everybody!  Make it a great one!