The Talk of the Town

Social Media vs the ‘Grapevine’. Long before Facebook and Twitter, the grapevine was the way word spread. The power of the ‘grapevine’ is just as powerful today and just as fast as the Internet.

On Saturday, April 17th, Alternative Focus held a workshop in historical Pt Townsend, WA. The workshop was called, “How would Dick shoot this?” Using PT Townsend’s historical buildings as the backdrop and location; instructor Dick Garvey took our group of nine students/photographers on a tour of Pt Townsend. We visited four locations, already scoped out by the instructor, at each location Dick explained how he would photograph that location and why. Then he would give the students an assignment, which was to shoot the location based on their interpretation of how he would do it, then shoot that same location based on how they would do it. They were given up to one hour to complete the assignment.

Having nine photographers standing in one area with their cameras and tripods started to attract a lot of attention. Questions started circulating: What were we photographing? What was going on? Was this a workshop? Who were we with? People started to stop and photograph with us, others stopped to listen to the instructor and watch. This was as entertaining as the workshop.

By lunchtime we were the talk of the town. Word had spread that there was a large group of photographers photographing downtown. They were talking about us in the stores and coffee shops. In a very short time everyone was talking about us.

While photographing a series of old buildings a local passerby noticed us and took a photograph of us using her cell phone. She then emailed it to a friend, asking her friend “What am I missing?” Her friend then took the photograph and posted it to her Facebook, titling it, “What am I missing?” Thus spreading the news even further.

No longer were we just the talk of Pt Townsend, we were now the talk of somebody’s Facebook and her network of ‘friends’ and their ‘friend’.

Just goes to show how powerful these tools are and how fast they work. Too bad we didn’t get the name of the Facebook friend, it would be great to link to it.

Grapevine or Social Networking - useful tools for spreading the word.