“I was late to blogging,” says Alec Soth, who first began writing one in September 2006. “My wife and I had just had our second child, so I was spending a lot of time at home, and I wanted to find a way to connect with other people and think about photography.”

To his surprise, alecsothblog.wordpress.com (where you can still read archive posts) became something of a phenomenon. Fellow blogger Rob Haggart, AKA Aphotoeditor, has described it as one of the seminal photography blogs, and its wide-ranging subject matter and engagingly informal tone attracted up to 2000 visitors per day as word of mouth spread about the Magnum photographer’s posts.

In fact it became so popular that Soth had to give it up. Deluged by emails from aspiring young photographers and cold-shouldered by friends who felt excluded from it, it started to feel like a second job, and he abandoned it. “I appreciate using blogs for self-promotion but I didn’t start it in that spirit,” he says. “By September 2007 I’d lost the ethos.”

That could have been that, but Soth’s blogging career didn’t end there. Last December he started up The Little Brown Mushroom, “a place to talk about good books”, updated by both Soth and a team of interns and assistants. It’s provided a forum to sell Soth’s own, self-published zines and books, and has proved so successful he’s setting up a publishing wing, with plans to publish Trent Parke’s next work.

Soth’s also championed Magnum Photos’ blog (albeit with limited success), and more recently started writing a blog for the Opinionator section of the New York Times. “I’ve done two so far and they were quite controversial,” he says. “They got hundreds of comments. The Opinionator is incredibly powerful, and it’s got this huge audience outside the art bubble.”

And blogs aren’t the only digital media he’s involved with – he also has a Facebook page, a Twitter account and a Tumblr site. How much all this helps commercially is a moot point – he makes most of his money through art prints sold in galleries – but one thing’s for sure, it doesn’t do any harm.

For many photographers, social media has more quantifiable effects. Chloe Browne, a London-based wedding photographer, has built such a good profile online that she has dispensed with going to traditional wedding fairs.

“I only recently began to use Twitter after three clients said they’d found me using it,” she laughs. “Most clients who have found me via Twitter have come across me from other people talking about my work. Twitter is fundamentally information sharing, and if your business depends on people sharing information about you, then it’s pretty essential.

“I update my Twitter throughout the day when I’m in front of my Mac, and occasionally whilst on a break if I have something to say about a wedding I’m at.”

One of the pros of Twitter is that it’s so succinct, she adds, and you can brand your account to match your site and blog. Facebook is useful because it’s so interactive, and acts as a portal into her website, although it was a bit of a leap of faith at first – “Nobody wants a fan page with just a handful of fans.”

Browne’s Facebook and blog pages link back to each other, her Twitter account and her main website, and she updates her Facebook page and Tweets each time she publishes a new blog, which is at least once a week. It is a lot of admin, she admits, but in her case it’s had real results – she only advertises online, and wins most of her new business this way.

She uses Google Analytics to track how people come to her website, and 22 percent come from Facebook, with a further 16 percent via Twitter, and 14 percent from her blog. Half her blog traffic comes from her website, meanwhile, 13 percent from Facebook and 5 percent from Twitter. Nearly a third, 30 percent, comes from direct URL entry. “I have tried to model my business on the way in which I myself looked for a wedding photographer last year,” she says. “I found the blogs more telling, as they show the photographer’s more recent work and you’re able to get an idea of their personality.”

Even still, she tries to meet her clients before agreeing to shoot their weddings, and that rings true with young documentary photographer Ben Roberts too. He met up with a US-based photographer called Andrew Hetherington on a trip to New York in 2008, after following his blog, What’s the Jackanory, for a couple of years. The pair had lunch and Hetherington looked through his portfolio. Roberts thought little more of it until last autumn, when he was nominated for PDN’s influential New and Emerging Photographers issue. Hetherington had recommended him. These days, blogs have influence.

Roberts’ own Twitter feeds make for lively reading, and his blog, If At First, is an interesting and often humorous insight into a working photographer’s life. He runs a Hidden Treasures spot on it every month or so, allowing followers to freely download an image – something that would have purists running for the hills.

He also runs a photostream on Flickr  and used to administrate HCSP, a Flickr-based street photography group that now has 25,000 members. “I don’t put much effort in but I know that if I upload something on Flickr I get 100 views in two hours,” he says. “I’m getting flown out to Vermont to shoot a wedding by a guy who saw my work on Flickr. I’d say I’ve won about £12,000 of business through it.”

Simon Roberts is another British photographer using the web to reach out to a wider audience, albeit for a different reason. For his We English project on national identity, he used social media to help find locations. “I didn’t want to shoot cheese-rolling in Gloucestershire, or any of those things that have been done so many times before, so I used the blog to get people to suggest ideas,” he says. “It was also a useful way to get funding for the project, because I could put sponsors’ logos on it. Then when I was up and running, it was a useful way to think about my research [into how other photographers had shot England and Britain]. I didn’t want to publish any old thing so I would spend half a day writing each and thinking through the issues.”

ELECTION PROJECT Simon Roberts was commissioned by the House of Commons to be the official photographer of the 2010 General Election, and a key part of his role was to solicit images created by the ‘voting public’, uploaded via a social networking site.

All to participate
The result proved so interesting that it’s been archived for posterity by the British Library, and it provided a natural forum once Roberts’ images were published as a book by Chris Boot in 2009. Roberts published some of the pages for free online to give an idea of what the book was all about, and got a few sales out of it. But for him the microsite was less about marketing and more about using an increasingly participatory approach. He set up his first blog, Motherland, to sound out Russian reactions to his depiction of the country; in We English, he used suggestions to dig deeper into the national psyche.

In his most recent work, The Election Project, commissioned by the House of Commons, he asked photographers to upload their own images to create a kind of national self-portrait of a great political shindig, alongside his own shots. In future, he hopes to construct something even more interactive. Each of his sites peaks in popularity when the project is current, then dies down, but they all keep ticking over. The Election Project in particular proved a hit online – given the nature of the initiative, Roberts tried to publicise it as widely as possible, getting interviews on BBC radio to reach a non-photographic audience. It will have another big peak when the images go on show in September.

Of course there are also pitfalls, as Ben Roberts knows. The company hosting his website went bust earlier in the year, meaning part of his online presence disappeared without warning – though he had his blog to keep people up to speed with the problem. Keeping up an online presence also takes money and effort – you need to set up your own pages to create a blog, and Simon Roberts has put around £1500 into each of his sites. Facebook and Twitter have few start up costs, but can eat into your time.

Another, less obvious, pitfall is tone of voice, because blogs and Tweets are much more relaxed than traditional media or sites. Even so, you need to keep up a professional front. Browne has a sensible rule to never complain about clients and fellow photographers, but Simon Roberts found out the hard way that negative posts always attract attention. “I put up something slightly critical about Martin Parr and it got a lot of attention,” he laughs. “I thought ‘Oops, bloody hell!’ You do need to be careful.”

“A blog has to have a voice, otherwise it’s like any other media out there,” agrees Soth. “But at the same time there are things I protect. For example, I wouldn’t post a picture of my kid.”

benrobertsphotography.wordpress.com
www.caughtthelight.blogspot.com
littlebrownmushroom.wordpress.com
www.simoncroberts.com