Ep 139 Creating Connection and Credibility with Virtual Photography

Small business owners and speakers have experienced quite a few setbacks over the last year. Those setbacks didn't stop us. We continued to show up and serve our audience even when our favorite stages were closed. You delivered transformational virtual presentations where the energy is infectious and your audience is engaged. But so much of our hard work behind the scenes has gone unnoticed.

Are you capturing the energy, the engagement, and the emotion that we're bringing to our virtual presentations and sharing it with others who are not in the room? The best way to get booked to speak is to allow others to see what it's like to be an audience member. Whether that means watching the presentation, hearing from audience members, or seeing snippets of the presentation... capturing the energy, emotion, and impact of your presentation is key to becoming an in-demand speaker.

On this episode of The Speak to Scale Podcast we're sitting down with John DeMato to learn how we can start creating deeper connection and credibility for our brand through professional virtual photography.

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Meet Our Guest, John DeMato

John is a branded lifestyle portrait, virtual and live event photographer who collaborates with speakers, trainers, consultants, and other expert-based business owners to create an emotional connection with their audience through persuasive visual storytelling. John isn't simply a photographer, he thinks like a true marketer. He sets clients up for success beyond the photo sessions by educating them on how to best leverage their image content for every touchpoint across their online presence.

As a former television producer, John's got over 20 years of production experience and has been featured as a portrait photographer expert on several NBC Universal daytime shows, all of his knowledge and expertise shines through in today's interview, because he's going to show us how you can leverage virtual photography to not only increase your influence and be seen as the go-to expert, but to make that meaningful connection with your audience and capture the energy in the emotion that you're bringing to the stage. Now John didn't start out as a virtual photographer.

Like many of us, his business kind of got flipped on its head over the last year. So let's turn the mic over to him and hear about how he was able to keep going, even when all the events were shut down.

The Birth of Virtual Photography

In March of 2020, John DeMAto was gearing up for an extremely busy year with traveling to a variety of places and countries with a variety of different experts hiring me for, you know, live events and their lifestyle portraits working with their teams. All of those plans got thrown in the garbage the moment that we got shut down.

John was a photography sponsor for the New York City chapter of the National Speakers Association. Part of the work he does for them is capture photos of their events, their monthly chapter meeting, headshots of board members, and various things like that. In April of 2020 they had a zoom meeting and John attended simply for the opportunity to connect with others during this season of isolation.

About three minutes into the meeting, John felt the itch to feel useful and do something. John thought, "You know what, let me grab the damn camera and see what I can get out of this." He began shooting, his home office, staring at my screen, and slumped in the chair. He quickly realized, these images were great.

In very next day, John DeMato published a post on Facebook describing this sense of wanting to feel useful. From that post, two people that participated in that event shared the post. From those two shares, I started getting emails, phone calls, and messages asking what I was doing. The next thing John knew, virtual photography became a core part of his offerings.

Screen Captures vs. Professional Virtual Photography

Both screen captures and professional virtual photography are valid options for documenting and showcasing your virtual speaking platform.

Shooting a shot with your iPhone, or having someone in the room take a photo behind the scenes–that's chronicling the event. It's a great peek behind the scenes and it's something that you can leverage on social media.

But those behind-the-scenes shots are not enough. Others want to know what it is like to be in the audience when you speak. They want a behind-the-scenes peek at what it feels like to be on the other side of the screen.

When you have a professional behind the camera, capturing photos of a laptop screen on a folding table the same way he captures photos of a live event, authors' books, lifestyle portraits of the same individuals–it's the same philosophy of capturing one thing in all ways.

With a professional behind the camera, the aesthetics, composition, and varied angling are there in a way that creates visual variety. One of the hardest things to capture in a screen grab is a presenter’s emotion, confidence, and body language.

Leverage Your Photography Assets for Public Speaking

These types of images serve as great social proof. John's clients are sharing these photos with Speaker bureaus as a way to promote themselves as in-demand speakers. On the other end on the marketing spectrum, his clients are also using these images on landing pages, in social media campaigns, for blog thumbnails, for presentation slides, as well as other materials, printed materials or digital PDFs.

Another great benefit to virtual photography images is that John's clients can turn to virtual event organizers and show them, "I'm a virtual speaker who still commands a professional speaker rate."

How to Look Professional When Speaking Virtually

If you're concerned that your home-office background doesn't look 'professional enough' for virtual photography, John asks, "Are you getting paid with the way everything looks right now? Well, that's good enough."

Successful imagery of your virtual speaking events is not about creating a bait and switch for your audience. It's about enhancing what you already have–the way you look, your outfits, what available space you have, what equipment you have. We work to make what you already have, better.

Get comfortable with who you are. Speakers are in the business of delivering transformations. If you want leave your audience better than you found them, you can't keep getting hung up on yourself. That's not the example you want to set for your audience. Ask yourself, "What is the overall value of these photos?" Focus on the impact they will make rather than the little details you've been overthinking.

"My job is to capture anyone who's on camera. Whether it's on a screen or in real life, capturing expressions and body language on them that represents this entire span of the emotional spectrum, from vulnerable to victory, and everything in between. Because the stories that all of these experts share, they may all be different, they may all have different anecdotes, but at the heart of it, at the emotional center of everything–they're sharing stories across that spectrum, all the time.

And as a result, in order to truly visually punctuate the sentiment of every story they want to share, they need to be able to easily go into their portfolios, a virtual shot, or lifestyle shot, a live event shot or workshop shot, whatever, and be able to pair that and complement those stories.

It's basically capturing my clients photos that are required for them to present themselves honestly and powerfully to their audience. That's what we're doing here. It doesn't matter that it's a screen, it's all the same stuff. It's all the same, because it's talking to the same audience about the same things just in a slightly different way."

-John DeMato

Is Virtual Photography Here to Stay?

Virtual photography is not just a temporary asset to fill a void. Many of John's clients have been using zoom for 10 years. They have master classes, they run webinars, or deliver their services via zoom–and maybe you do too.

This stuff isn't going anywhere. Even when in-person events are fully opened, we are still going to be leveraging virtual platforms for other areas of our businesses.

If you're not already a member of the academy, we'd love to invite you to apply to join The Speaking Strategy Academy. You'll get instant access to our A-Z speaking training system with video lessons, transcripts, scripts, templates, and more.... access to our live group coaching calls, personalized 1:1 feedback on your work from me, and an opportunity to present your work live in front of our community for hot seat coaching and feedback. What are you waiting for, friend? Apply today!

Join The Speaking Strategy Academy

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