Seeing is Believing… and Feeling

Do you remember the first time you sent a text message to a friend on your mobile phone? Odds are it was using alphanumerics. Odds are you felt both delight at being able to send words and sentences via your phone, while at the same time encumbered by the complexity of making it happen.

Fast-forward to today. Text messaging has not only become incredibly simple, thanks to mobiles’ implementation full keyboards, autocomplete and voice recognition, but visual features have kicked it up a notch as well.

Emojis, which were once thought of as cutesy icons reserved for teenagers with perpetual OMG and ROFLMAO syndrome, have become a legitimate and well-adopted way for us to communicate with each other.

Whether we’re feeling happy, sad, angry, silly, hungry, tired, flirty or any other emotion, there are emojis which sum up our feelings with one character stroke.

Of course, this ability to share our thoughts and feelings visually has crossed the threshold of mobile and become part of the social fabric.

Facebook now invites us to share how we are feeling as part of any update. So whether you are feeling blessed, determined, annoyed, motivated, nostalgic, lost or any of several dozens of emotions, we are able to add a more defined human element to our posts than our words may be able to communicate.

As if emojis weren’t enough, Facebook allows us to communicate with each other via messenger and in our comments using “stickers”. Still and animated cartoons from both well-known and obscure or new original characters, stickers are a fun and playful way to comment publicly or privately.

I have a confession to make. I am a sticker fiend. I so enjoy replying to my friends with the perfect sticker. A picture, after all, can say a thousand words.

Whether it’s Animal from the Muppets, Pusheen (the fat cat with character) or the simple Facebook big “thumb up” like, stickers effectively and expediently can add feeling or humor to a conversation. My personal favorite is a little guy named “Tuzki”.

So if a picture says a thousand words, what happens when you take a picture and add words to it? I see it as the next level of sharing thoughts and feelings, as well as entertaining.

Memes are nothing new. A variety of websites have made it simple to take a photo and add Impact font words to it. Unless you are familiar with photoshop, placing text on images can be a daunting task.

We’ve already got apps with dozens of filters that raise all of our photo proficiency to the next level.

But now there are apps which allow us to place professional-grade designer text on our photos. My favorite for iOS is called WordSwag. Those on the Android platform would do well to install PicLab.

Either of these apps allow you to embellish your photo with stylized text which looks very impressive. Simply select your photo, type in your words, select from dozens of styles and save your photo to the social stream of your choice.

Whether you are sharing your own thoughts or quoting someone else, these “photoquotes” as I have dubbed them, are highly effective in bringing engagement from your audience. When I started posting my own thoughts with photos of myself, I noticed a sharp uptick in the number of likes, comments and shares. People love to engage with engaging photoquotes!

Personally, I create photoquotes using the same goals as when I speak or write. I’m either creating content to inspire, teach or entertain. Often, it’s a combination of any or all of these.

In Summer of 2014, I was asked to speak at a marketing event in my hometown of Denver, Colorado. As I had been on the road for a couple weeks, I hadn’t given much thought to what I was going to speak on. The day before I was scheduled, one of the attendees asked me about my topic, so I asked what they would like to hear from me.

She mentioned that she really enjoyed the photoquotes I had been posting on social media, and she was curious as to the genesis of some of them. I was intrigued by the idea and crafted an entire presentation around my more popular photoquotes and the story behind them.

As it turned out, the images were just as engaging on the big screen and people really enjoyed hearing the story behind the story. My words and pictures were dubbed “social poetry” by one of the attendees. It’s become one of my goals to inspire others to share their own social poetry. After all, we’ve all got something to say. Why not say it with words and pictures?

The I enjoyed the concept so much that I turned my photoquotes into a book titled \”Social Poetry: Boosting Engagement and Encouraging Conversation by Using Inspirational, Educational and Entertaining Photoquotes.\”

They say that seeing is believing.

Whether an emoji, sticker or photo, social confirms that seeing is not only believing, but also feeling.

I know you\’ve got some thoughts on the subject, so please use the comments field below to share them!