The Story of Lenzr

The Story of Lenzr

By Rob Campbell

Lenzr is the first serial photo contest website in Canada, and maybe all of North America.There are other photo contest websites, and other Facebook contest plug-in manufacturers and software developers, but no website has a core community like Lenzr and offers such attractions while being free to join, free to enter contests and win prizes. Our members are encouraged to use the site to network and promote their own photography websites. Right from the beginning we wanted to make Lenzr into an online attraction, like a shopping mall movieplex with multiple screens: No matter when you come in here, any time of the day, there ís always something playing.Today Lenzr is a pretty slick little website.The blog is great reading, the forum full of informative and provocative posts, and, of course, there are always a multitude of photo contests on display on the homepage. The most important part of the mix is the community of photographers and artists that use the site. Flip through the profiles section and you will see some very talented people competing in contests and participating in our community. Best of all, the website is free and there is still no advertising. Look out for new mobile contrivances coming Summer 2011, and stay tuned for events and special attractions.

Lenzr has really grown in two years; let me tell you how it all started.

In April of 2007, I had a lonely little blogspot called Dumpdiggers blog that I was writing on very frequently. At that time I was an IATSE grip in the Toronto film and television industry. I was trying to make a TV show about antiques collectors who research and recover historic relics from century old dump sites--literally digging up buried treasure.

Unfortunately there were a couple of problems with that idea: For one it's illegal, and secondly, logistics. To get a whole show full of good digging would take an army of researchers traveling about unearthing test pits everywhere, and I'm sure archeologists from every university and museum in North America would have something to say about that, and then sponsors would receive complaints. I settled for simply making a social network called Dumpdiggers with a discussion forum and free classifieds, etc. I tried to make the website into a real social network at one time and expand beyond antiques collectors. But we ran out of money, and things broke that couldn't be fixed. 

However, inside this failed web experiment was the germ of something much bigger.

Alongside the discussion forum was a page called The Dumpdiggers Arena - Photo Battles wherein antiques collectors could battle with pictures. It was a drop and drag mechanism whereby the user was invited to select the best image from 12 boxes and then drag and drop it in the centre slot. They would enter to win prizes and for the honour of having the best object in a particular niche. The prizes were donated by Tim Braithwaite, among others, and the contest changed monthly. It ran for six months with limited success. You can read a blog post about The Dumpdiggers Arena Photo Battle page on Smojoe. What was remarkable was how easy it was to promote the attraction in otherwise stodgy antiques forums and blogs. I had Ace, and Erik the Bottle Viking from Privvydiggers.com and other YouTube relic hunters promoting it almost from day one..

Dumpdiggers remains unfunded. The enterprise will never go into production because of the problems I outlined earlier, so I switched gears. The software powering The Arena broke down and there was no money to fix it, so the idea of having a permanent interactive photo battle went back up onto the shelf.

Chapter 2: LifeCapture Interactive

I learned the basis of everything I know about marketing while working at LifeCapture Interactive with the Eady Brothers and Geoff Whilock, Dan Riley, James Milward and Stephen Crooks, and I should probably mention Paul Coulter in this chapter too. All these folks have great careers now and manage start-ups or work as executives in Toronto marketing companies.

Back then we were all five years more zealous as we pioneered social media marketing techniques before they were considered cliché, and learned new systems ourselves while spreading messages about Hollywood movies for Alliance Films (the best client a small marketing company could ever want.)

We wrote articles, blogs and discussion forum posts for eighteen different Alliance Films micro-sites/trailers to help market movies in a social media long tail. I started Canada Blog Friends to gather together and index Canada's best bloggers and we all developed communities around our online avatars and digital alter egos. At

LifeCapture Interactive we got down and dirty in discussion forums and gave away tickets to see the movies on contest forums, and occasionally we had to invent some sort of attraction that would further spread the message.

Photo contests worked- I would always suggest them and the other guys would dismiss the concept as uninspired. But each and every time we executed a photo contest, it was a big success. In March 2009, LifeCapture Interactive sold to Arlene Dickenson of Venture Communications, the CBC Dragonís Den venture capitalist, and the entire office moved two streets north to the Venture Communications building at Queen and John St.

Chapter 3: Smojoe social marketing solutions

In May 2008, after three years of sharing resources and ideas I started Smojoe Social Media Marketing and hung a sign over my own home computer. I was selling social relevance, but I didn't know that yet. Deborah Lewis of Toronto City Events invited me to do a speaking series on social media marketing and that proved to be a very effective way to get customers. Back then I used to be dismissive of Facebook and Twitter and my message was 100% unique. I met a cord blood bank and Miss Teen Canada World at the same event. For another year or so, at regular intervals, Deb Lewis and I would host marketing lecture series events at The Spoke Club, and many people came out to hear me ramble on about how Smojoe builds 'social relevance'.

 One super skilled web tech whiz I met right after I went solo was Will Webb. He was 21 years old at the time and running Innate Media Group from an office in Barrie, Ontario. I met Will Webb on Craigslist--he was advertising for help promoting his Party Aftermath website, a fledgling social network based in Barrie. It was a user submitted content model that promoted the local bar scene, and he was trying to expand into the Toronto market. I knew it wasn't a very viable project rather early on, and was never very supportive. Will Webb's brain and business network was a very valuable resource however and its fair to say that Lenzr would not exist today if I had not met Will Webb when I did.

 November 2010 was a milestone. Lenzr had over 11,000 visitors that month, and the Backyard Critters photo contest had one of the first ever vote-offs with contestants competing against each other to rally friends and vote up their pictures. In the end there were over 40 entries and several thousand votes logged. Lenzr was growing... We took January off and reformulated the business, starting from the top. In February we launched with eight contests, the most ever for one period. Let's go back in time to January 2010.

 Brett Patriquin introduced Lenzr to David Shephard and after the briefest explanation David agreed to test the Lenzr contest storytelling on his own 'grass cutting' business.

David builds websites and owns a boutique marketing company called Jib.ca He knows many things about online marketing and proper website design; his shop specializes in gutsy Wordpress design whenever possible. He has fashioned a fine business around the powerful skills of talented website design and build team. But David has three other businesses as well, and they were hungry for a relevance building solution to increase traffic and conversation on his existing websites that he was promoting using Google AdWords.

David became Lenzr's best customer as he used the website's photo contests to build awareness for his solar powered industries: A grass cutting business, deck building business and solar powered generators. Portable Solar Power can change the world--it became clear that it could easily help replace two cycle motors which are particularly bad polluters. This became our 'business story'

Lenzr spread the message with the How Green Are You? photo contest, following that up with the People Building Things photo contest and especially the Morning Sunshine photo contest which had over 80 submissions and almost 4500 votes! Web traffic skyrocketed on all of these fresh websites, and David Shephard soon became interested in helping Lenzr grow bigger, get better, and become a more reknowned and respected marketing tool. His advice made sense from day one, and his no-excuses policies set a very steady drumbeat to which we now march. David Shephard is a serial entrepreneur and veteran marketing dude. He had big ideas for Lenzr and alongside Will Webb, in January 2011, I formalized an agreement to share space and jointly engage in the practice and art of using photo contests as vessels for brand storytelling. 

Chapter 5: The Next Level

Three visioneers Will Webb, Rob Campbell and David Shephard entered into a formal agreement for the betterment of the website and Lenzr enterprise in January 2011. We jointly invested time, energy and money and knowledge into improving Lenzr and making this into a multifaceted community for camera buffs and social businesses. The new Lenzr has reputation points which will be worth material rewards someday. Please, upload a photo and get active in the discussion forums. Interact with staff. These are the Lenzr community managers.

IN THE FUTURE we will be developing an iPhone application for easy submission to Lenzr, and we'll make it possible to license Lenzr images from photographers. Already there is a large database of user submitted images. Today we're looking for sponsors--do you want Lenzr to help you sell something online at your own website? Contact us!

The following excerpt is from the Lenzr blog, HOW TO TELL BUSINESS STORIES WITH LENZR PHOTO CONTESTS

Lenzr contest producers are business storytellers, but they don't know how their story ends until they tally up the Judges' scores at the end of the match. The story ends when the winner gets their prize.

Lenzr is Canada's first serial photo contest website; it's an interactive arena for photographic arts competition and business storytelling.

Photo contest producers dream up visual challenges loosely related to their sponsor's goods and services, and they administrate over a growing collection of user submitted content inside a sixty day campaign period. In that time, Lenzr's own social media marketers work really hard to engineer an orchestra of participation around their visual fable in as many different niches as possible, all over the web.

Storytelling is a very important part of the process. People want to be a part of something. When they upload a photo on Lenzr, their picture becomes part of a bigger story: Their fridge contains something unusual, or they once survived a terrible storm (two sponsored stories from the April May 2011 session.) A printable coupons website wonders What's In The Fridge? and a commercial roofing company asks folks to Weather The Storm and use powerful imagery to tell them about it. People are storytellers too, and they want a place to share their amusing images, a chance to have the best story--perhaps even more than they want the actual prize. Web 2.0 is a term that describes the use of Worldwide Web technology to enhance creativity, information sharing, and most notably, collaboration amongst users. Tim O'Reilly defines Web 2.0 as 'a set of economic, social, and technology trends that collectively form the basis for the next generation of the Internet, a more mature, distinctive medium characterized by user participation, openness, and network effects'.

The best Lenzr contests create a visual database of user submitted knowledge that remains relevant to the sponsor's niche long after the contest ends.

Ontario Tourist Attractions and Canadian Beaches are two excellent examples of how photo contests can build a rich media resource to benefit society for the rest of time. Each user submitted photo becomes part of the business story. (Note: the photos supplement the media-rich story for our sponsors, they do NOT become the sponsor's property). Graveyard Zombie's Food Hunt by a member named lenzrgirl2011 is a brilliant self portrait taken from inside her fridge. This user found time to get creative and tell us a convincing story about her 'long night's work' at a hospital and her sweet slumber during the day. She's a natural storyteller, and will no doubt be rewarded with a prize.. someday. All she has to do is get into the Top Ten, and the Judges will be so moved by her story, they may give her composition the nod. She could win $500 worth of groceries from a printable coupons website. Custom-made Lenzr photo contests are a great addition to any Web 2.0 interactive marketing campaign, especially longer campaigns that are theme related. Each sponsored page becomes a bastion of user submitted visual content that can be tweeted and added to Facebook.

What's the secret behind Lenzr?

Shutterbugs locked in competition need friends to come vote and comment on their pictures so they earn a place in the Top Ten user-ranked images. Consequently they must promote their submissions on forums, art groups, and on their own Facebook and Twitter updates, and this action shares engagement through multiple people networks. That's Lenzr--that's why it works. People get excited about seeing and sharing their art. And let's remember the sharing won't happen unless the story is cool; people want to show off their work and remind friends of their abilities, but they won't play if it's too commercial or boring. Voting is how we throw gasoline on the image stack and set it ablaze. The client's story and brand logo is right above this well optimized stack of user submitted content. Our Google Analytics data always shows a sharp incline in participation right around the forty-five day period when voting begins, and that's also a part of instigating a web 2.0 story. Lenzr builds a collection, and then optimizes it through voting. The story ends when the winner gets the prize.