News
New Zealand firm Keedup to provide outsourced research services to photo libraries
Keedup, an Auckland, New Zealand keywording company, has decided to add another service to its offerings to stock photo libraries: picture research. The company believes many photo libraries miss out on sales because their staff can't keep up with research requests during regular business hours or simply don't get to off-hours requests soon enough to meet clients' deadlines. According Kevin Townsend, managing director at Keedup, "This is a particularly big problem for small to medium size libraries and photo agencies who are based in one country. When the day comes to an end there is often no one around to deal with customers' research requests."
When asked how the business might charge clients for the service, Townsend responded, "Our favored option would be to charge a minimum rate per search, with a per-hour rate kicking in if the search took more than the standard time. Obviously clients would be worried that we might spend forever doing each search and give them a big bill. For that reason we would set time and budget limits either as an ongoing standard or for each particular search."
Exactly how the research requests would be communicated from end-user to photo library to Keedup researchers remains to be worked out. The company envisions using voicemail referrals for after-hours calls and automated search request forms on the photo library's web-site. Keedup's time-zone gives the advantage of having its researchers work during off-hours in Europe and North America. "Once we were in full swing then libraries signing up to our service would have the luxury of having their requests dealt with whenever necessary 24 hours a day," Townsend says. "Our vision is of salespeople coming in each morning and finding a whole stack of leads to follow up as a result of the work we did over night."
Townsend says Keedup will offer the service strictly to image libraries and not image buyers. "That means we would remain totally focused on providing images from the library we were working for at the time. If we acted like a general research service and cherry picked from a variety of agencies there wouldn't be much point us being in the market."
The Keedup keyword business is an offshoot of the stock image library More Images.
Web-site: www.Keedup.com
Posted in: Keywording / Metadata, News, Stock Photo Companies
