I was thrilled, not one week after the Toronto Film Festival and my social media gig with Cadillac Festival Insider concluded, I was asked to join the @ChevyOnScene project.

Toronto’s Nuit Blanche all-night street arts festival provided a unique opportunity to showcase the all-new Chevrolet Cruze in some very cool ways. General Motors spared no expense in creating CRUZE Remix – a sponsored live installation during Nuit Blanche where driving really did meet art.

I was commissioned to tweet and photograph all things CRUZE Remix and provide our @ChevyOnScene community a real-time feed of our overnight experience.

To also ensure the best elements of the Chevrolet CRUZE Remix event at Nuit Blanche lived on in social media for all to share – I directed a series of YouTube videos with my team, fellow insider and host Skye Collyer and video editor / shooter Edge with each part of the video series capturing a specific aspect of the CRUZE Remix experience.

As well, the idea behind a lot of my news content marketing is driving traffic – somewhere. And I don’t usually see much benefit in just continuing to drive traffic to other peoples sites like Twitpic (believe me, they get enough hits each day.)

i.shot7.com is going to be the place where I play around with this idea. And with a couple of iPhone apps – I’m going to publish breaking news bits from the assignments I’m on. Consider it a compliment to the hi-res photos I already shoot.

How’s it done?

My easy workflow to go from picture to post in minutes is basically this: I first experimented with a few different ways to approach the problem. I’ve basically settled on this method and the apps / API’s to make the magic happen:

I shoot a photo with my iPhone. I usually then import picture into the excellent and fast Comic Touch app to have a little fun. Save.

Now, here is where I first tried to use the Wordpress app to basically write a post and upload photo from scratch.

But alas, I found a quicker way for myself. And it involves my Flickr account and some powerful things you can do in there (though, please note: this does involve setting up the Flickr API so it “talks” to your wordpress blog.)

After I snap my picture and ready to post. I email to a private Flickr address specially set-up. From there the API takes over and automatically formats and posts my email and attached photo to i.shot7.com – a self-hosted wordpress blog (which I actually just made a sub-domain of my main photo site shot7.com)

I find it much faster sending an email than writing a blog post from scratch. Afterwords, if I want to add or make changes, I then use the wordpress iPhone app to edit the post that’s now set up.

Lastly, I do use the Twitter Tools plug-in on my wordpress install so when I email my blog post – it also sends out automatically a nice URL fitted Tweet.

I further developed the Twitter.com/tiffinsider account. Over the course of six-weeks, the Twitter account amassed over 1,400 followers. Hundreds of exclusive tiff photos were shot and uploaded to twitPic and Flickr which saw tens of thousands of views during the campaign. Also established the TIFFinsider YouTube channel, and with nineteen videos uploaded has seen over 25,000 views cumulative.

I consulted and made recommendations to the Maclaren Momentum technical people regarding blog design, SEO, and issues related to server security, maintenance, and plug-in recommendations on the Wordpress managed blog.

I created shot7.com to showcase and share my news photography. I like to consider it the beginnings of a new type of photo agency – one where content is first thought in terms of how it connects, rather than just a means to commerce.

The shot7.com home page lets users know the latest photo news we’ve posted and images you can grab. Also, the blog is where we talk about the stuff that makes us all better photographers, as well, some behind-the-scenes stories of our assignments.

High quality celebrity photography you see in magazines, newspapers, and brand-name websites is now available to blogs and all news sites – for free or little cost (the cost is just a link!) Premium services based on real-time reporting and photo exclusivity are coming in 2010.

The Scrawler, Mr. Joe Warmington, of The Toronto Sun picked up on my Diane Keaton at Union Station story and published a photo in today’s Saturday Sun. Nice, big, and in colour – which is always nice.

Its been good to see my Keaton story travel to so many news sites – and make it into print in a couple of nice places. But I personally will never be totally happy with that shoot. I will always feel I blew the Keaton exclusive. My shots should have been better considering the circumstances. I just didn’t get close enough.

When other aspiring photographers ask me for that one good rule. I never hesitate to say, “get as close to your subject as you possibly can.”

www.tiff.shovine.com was set up by 4 people (all partners in a web design and marketing company) to use technology to report breaking celebrity news stories from the Toronto Film Festival. A news blog was set-up, and laptops, smartphones, digital cameras were packed and used with texting, email, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, Google in the world of the Toronto Film International Festival to report celebrity news. In many cases, published faster online than the big media boys.