Can You Connect With the Connected Consumer?

This moving target is more immersed 
in imaging than 
ever before

This month's cover story examines the new imaging behaviors connected consumers are developing and some key ways retailers can tap into them.

he great irony of the contemporary photo retail landscape is that, at a time of arguably its greatest uncertainty and potential peril, photography has never been more popular.

Consider this: the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) polled consumers about their digital photography habits and found people snap an average of almost two pictures a day (about 588 a year). This is not the photography of life's big events, but the photography of the moment. Every moment.

This photographic life is being driven by mobility—both the ease with which cameras can be slipped into pockets and carried everywhere, and the ever-pervasive camera phone. Over 77 percent of adults and a whopping 71 percent of children under 18 now own one, according to Pew Research, and the majority of phones sold feature a camera.

Not only do we all have phones, the phones we have do more. The research firm NPD Group found that 28 percent of all handsets purchased in the second quarter of this year in the U.S. were application-rich smartphones. One in five handsets sold during the quarter had Wi-Fi capability.

All of that means that these consumers, and particularly those under age 18, can stay connected while on the move. And connect they have. Pew found that 26 percent of children under 18 send messages daily via social networks like Facebook, while 24 percent use instant messaging on a daily basis. When CEA asked consumers where they stored their digital data, roughly 22 percent were toting significant amounts on their mobile phones.

Get a (Connected) Life

There has been another seismic shift among consumers, and it has nothing to do with the volume of images taken but where those images are going. While e-mail remains the biggest driver of virtual sharing, the social networking Web sites MySpace and Facebook are now vacuuming up consumer images by the gigabyte. CEA found that MySpace and Facebook rank first and second, respectively, for online photo uploads, eclipsing the print-driven photo sites like Snapfish and Kodak Gallery. com. Score, a research firm that ranks Web site popularity, scored Facebook as the No. 1 photo-sharing site in the country. According to a Facebook spokesperson, the company receives 1 billion (yes, that's a "b") photos to its servers each month.

Who's responsible for this? While social networking is gradually broadening its demographic appeal, it's still a game for the young. People aged 18-29 were almost twice as likely as the next age bracket (30-49 years old) to post their photos to social networking sites, according to a survey conducted by NPD. While almost 60 percent of the 18-29-year-old cohort posted their photos to the Web, only 36 percent printed snapshots, NPD found.