Brands tell stories with users’ Facebook photos via social marketing company Polite in Public

Joshua Phillips is the director of Polite in Public – a new breed of social marketing company that equips brands with the tools to tell stories over social networks via branded photos.

A Sydney University media graduate and former senior public relations consultant to Bank of America in New York, Phillips believes companies have become modern-day storytellers.

Says Phillips: “When Facebook introduced Timeline earlier this year, they made a pretty clear statement to their 800 million users – your life story will now be told primarily with photos. Users were not given a choice. That’s probably the same reason they bought Instagram – photos have become the most valuable, persuasive and sought-after real estate on social networks.”

Facebook has back up this sentiment – in their very own Best Practice and Media Strategy page, it implores brands to use images in their storytelling because they have an engagement rate 180 per cent higher than an average post. According to Phillips, this makes perfect sense.

Says Phillips: “The facts on social media and photos are pretty straightforward. Firstly, you have this immense number of photos being uploaded to social networks every day – around 250 million on Facebook alone. Second, you have these photos actually driving traffic to sites – with something like 30% of Facebook photos generating referral traffic to outside websites. Even in their infancy photo-based sites like Pinterest are actually ahead of Google + and LinkedIn when it comes to referring traffic – with around 4% referral rates. For corporate clients – this presents an opportunity to drive traffic via a branded image – and that’s where we come in.”

One of the ways companies like MasterCard, Coca-Cola and ANZ are telling their own ‘stories’ is by using Polite In Public photo booths on-site at their events. For around $3,000 a brand can engage Polite In Public to set up a social media photo booth and breach the divide between the real and online worlds – sharing instantly branded content organically via social media. Polite In Public photo booths not only take images, they airbrush them instantly and place branding such as logos and special graphic effects on the photos – the idea being that people are more likely to share airbrushed images where they look great – rather than standard, raw images where they look ordinary. According to Phillips, this move into photo sharing on-site at events is symptomatic of a larger shift in the social media milieu and points to an inextricable relationship between storytelling and sales.

“Advertising was once about telling consumers what to do – now it’s about saying ‘we did this together’. It’s about building stories and getting customers or ‘fans’ to engage – to listen. I wouldn’t necessarily say companies want to control the narrative, but they certainly want to have their story told – and a picture tells a thousand words.”

Polite in Public has offices in Sydney, New York and Los Angeles.