Adrian Dayton is an attorney with a passion for growing law practices through the power of social media. We met through twitter about a year ago and meet bi-monthly for lunch to discuss our respective consulting practices.

We’ve often discussed how our websites and social media profile pictures are the first impression that we give to any perspective clients. I always remind clients that the quality of your imagery reflects the quality of your brand in the minds of your customers.

Adrian is in the process of branding his practice. He had invested in a (soon to be released) new website and graphic design services for his marketing collateral. So it was definitely time for us to put together some high quality images to be used across his different marketing channels.

If you’re a lawyer, I’d highly recommend giving Adrian a tweet to discuss how he can help you with your social media marketing for your practice.

My HTC Eris arrived just in time for the trip.  I soon fell in love with it’s 5 megapixel camera and a little application called vignette.  I plan to use it for “quick-and-dirty” documentation through out this years month long road trip.

Amber and I headed down to my family’s cottage on Keuka lake as a quick vacation before “All-You-Can-Jet” — we thought it would be a great way to relax before my national speaking tour.  We took the opportunity to use it as a dry-run to test out our workflows and make sure we didn’t forget to pack anything.

Here are some photos from the first day of our trip.

Here is the presentation that I gave to ASMP’s WNY Chapter last night at Booksmart Studio. Give it a click through and if you’re interested in having me present it (or something similar) to your organization, please give me a call (716) 222-0237.

Doug Stanhope played Nietzsche’s in Buffalo, NY on May 22nd, 2010 and agreed to let me shoot a few portraits of him after the show.

These images were taken in a small stairwell with only about five-minutes from Doug walking off stage until I was breaking down my gear. Doug is very dedicated to his fans and had been on stage for almost two hours. I know how tiring it can be to be on tour, so I wanted to finish the shoot as efficiently as possible. That’s why it’s always important to practice, practice, practice.

I had my lighting designed and my exposure correct in about three test shots. We took about five frames after that and then I thanked him for his time and we parted ways.  I really appreciate Doug taking the time to let me photograph him, please check out his act and buy his merch!

You can hear what Doug Stanhope has to say at:

http://www.dougstanhope.com
http://www.facebook.com/officialstanhope
http://www.myspace.com/dougstanhope

Smoke Rendering Courtesy: Philip Brunner

I love Follow Friday, it’s a great way to add value to your network by suggesting quality feeds to your readers. Traditionally, you would just create a list of twitter user names of people that you found interesting, maybe a few words for context, and the hashtag #FF.

Here is an example of a properly formed #FF post:

@buffalogeek: Here’s a #Buffalo FF @susanlynncope @nickelcity @clarkdever @charlieriley @peteherr @buffawhat @mattbova @herobeth @nowbuffalo

The benefits of the traditional form of Follow Friday are these:

• Concise
• Easy to follow people directly from the tweet
• You tend to get retweeted as a Thank You from the people you list

The drawbacks that I see are the following:

• You don’t get to give much information about why you are listing them
• It’s a very ephemeral media to make a recommendation through
• It spams up the twitterstream all day and makes it more challenging to find good posts
• It doesn’t allow you to give them any link-love;  In-bound links are the currency of the internet.  If you really want to promote a friend or follower, a link to their website helps their google rank and their follower count.

With these issues in mind, I present to you my first; second-generation #FF post.

• @adriandayton – Had a great lunch with this man today, he tops the Twitter charts for Buffalo with over 50k followers.  He makes his living consulting and speaking on Social Media for Lawyers.
• @buffalogeek – Broke the Carl Paladino E-mail Scandal this week, spends equal time muckraking and nerding it up.  He is an anchor point in the Buffalo tech community and his political blog is a great read.
• @susanlynncope – My fiancee surprised me this week with her initiative to create TEDxBuffalo;  She strives to be a thought leader on how to integrate Social Media in to Event Planning.
• @kevinpurdy – Editor of one of my favorite blogs and a fellow Buffalonian.  His personal blog might not be as geeky as LifeHacker, but it’s still well worth the read.
• @karakane – Kara is in charge of Communications at Medaille College, she recently hired me for an event.  I was pleasantly surprised by her media savvy and her communications blog.
• @himay – Jamie is a biochemistry graduate student at the University of Buffalo, if you thought his hacking ended with GMOs; you’d be wrong.  This guy and his bacteria blog scare the crap out of me; I’m recommending you read him not only out of fear for humanity(someone needs to keep an on eye on this guy) but also for his great conversational skills and futurist interests.

So there you #FF 2.0 (#FF2).  I hope you enjoyed it and if you like the idea, feel free to steal it.  I’d love to see more in depth descriptions of peoples relationships with twitter and their community.