5 Reasons to Embrace the Marketing Power of the Best Selfies

5 Reasons to Embrace the Marketing Power of the Best Selfies 5 Reasons to Embrace the Marketing Power of the Best Selfies Image Source: Virgin.comUNLESS for the past half-decade  you’ve been somewhere beyond the reach of social media, you’ll  know that the Selfie  has become one of the social networks’ most potent ways of getting attention.  As an effective attention-getter, the best selfies have  been studied with interest in recent years, particularly by experts in disruptive technology and digital and content  marketing.The potential of the best selfies  has also taken hold among employees and managers and owners of companies, and they are often used, very potently, as a marketing tool  that effectively highlights  the best  qualities of their teams and wider organisations.For a good example of this, see the  featured image above, showing Virgin chief Sir Richard Branson and the DS Virgin Racing crew at the FIA Formula E season finale  in the Summer of 2016.Here are five reasons  why the selfie, once lampooned by many as shameless exhibitionism, is here to stay, and why the best selfies work so well at spreading a message.1. ReachSome  of the numbers attached to the reach and penetration  of selfies are absolutely staggering. The most widely viewed and shared selfies tend to be from celebrities or others in the public eye.But occasionally, a selfie posted by an ‘ordinary’ person, to quote a phrase beloved of  internet commentators, breaks the internet.Naturally, from time to time, this  virality comes about for reasons that aren’t  entirely professional.For instance, this man  posted to his  Imgur account the following  picture of himself and his wife, while their daughter was being born…View post on imgur.com…and it was viewed more than  4.3m times, attracting hundreds of comments.  No surprise that  it earned a prominent position on the  Cosmopolitan  magazine list of the most viral selfies of 2015.But such selfies  are not everyone’s cup of tea. And that one, with all due respect to the poster, is not the type of stuff that will fly high in feminist circles . Neither are the numerous selfies of Hollywood actresses and WAGS who regularly share revealing or entirely nude pictures of their bodies.2. Awareness-RaisingWHILE selfies work well for social fun, they are just as effective for genuinely ground-breaking, educational and awe-inspiring reasons. For example, take the incredible 2013 self-taken photograph  by Aki Hoshide, an astronaut on the International Space Station.While Hoshide may not have conceived of the picture as a selfie per se, it was certainly branded as one in a quickdraw tweet by Buzzfeed reporter Andrew Kaczynskiâ€"“there are selfies and then, well, there are selfies”â€"which was retweeted 4,690 and liked 2,507 times.There are selfies, and then, well there are selfies. pic.twitter.com/g9bLaiu3k6â€" andrew kaczynski (@BuzzFeedAndrew) November 17, 2013This is  a  pretty good example of the collaborative creative potential of sharing over the social networks.3.  Authoritative  ValidationWe have  to  be clear about one thing: selfies, particularly the best selfies,  have become a ‘thing’. And that is not just according to ‘cool’ or hipster sources. No less an  authoritative source than The Oxford English Dictionary  declared “Selfie” to be  its word of the year  in 2013.Who is AGENT to quibble with The Oxford English Dictionary? A measure of the ubiquity of the selfie is how many political and other civic leaders use them as a means of interfacing with the public. Most famous of these leaders was the particularly social media savvy former US President Barack Obama. [WPGP gif_id=4867 width=750]gif SOURCE:  GIPHY4. Shift from Solo to Group SelfieIt’s  only  a small leap from posting a photograph of yourself, to taking one of you with your friends or colleagues. And so it is that the group selfie has become as much of a phenomenon as its solo selfie forbear. It probably had its defining moment on the morning of March 3, 2014.By that point in time, a group selfie taken at the Oscars the previous evening by actor Bradley Cooper and tweeted in the small hours of the morning by ceremony host Ellen DeGeneres, had been retweeted by 2.4m people, embedded on 13,711 websites, and seen directly from the timelines, mobile and desktop apps of 8.1m users.If only Bradleys arm was longer. Best photo ever. #oscars pic.twitter.com/C9U5NOtGapâ€" Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) March 3, 2014What began as an apparently  ad-libbed lark by DeGeneres has become a serious case study among academics and marketers. This makes it the ultimate A-List group selfie.5. Ongoing  Evolution Image Source: AmazonCheck Price   The  concept of the selfie continues to evolve, and it doesn’t stop at still pictures. A quick look at the average  Instagram post now shows a significant number of people opting to post as many ‘to camera’ video clips as still photos.In the field of popular culture, too, what is the actor and show host James Corden’s hugely popular Carpool Karaoke but a moving selfie: with Corden and his iconic celebrity passengers showing a relatively unguarded side of themselves… for the pleasure of millions.  Just one look at the shares of the episode starring British singer Adele reveals the power of this form of content marketingâ€"146,308,776 views. VIDEO SOURCE: YOUTUBESo, what  does all this tell us about the best selfies? They are a means of  self-promotion, really, a method of public profiling, even when done in a private capacity.As we’ve seen above, few things instantaneously engage and grab the attention quite like a well-taken selfie, and when it comes to social networking, and marketing, engagement and attracting attention is everything.The celebrity selfie is particularly potent. It provides an intimate glimpse into the life of someone who normally does everything to control their image. Its a  fleeting glimpse into  an otherwise private moment. (Occasionally,  too much of a glimpse, but such is the open range of the internet!)To conclude on a simple but compelling point, there’s an interesting  New York Times  article written by the actor and director James Franco, in which he concludes that the best selfies are “avatars” which we send out to give others a sense of who we are.A newcomer to social media at the time, he wrote this article, Franco concludes:“I am actually turned off when I look at an account and don’t see any selfies, because I want to know who Im dealing with. In our age of social networking, the selfie is the new way to look someone right in the eye and say, ‘Hello, this is me.’.”We could hardly put it any better.