Dream and Hustle

Creating a Facebook Photo Booth Hustle to Market and Promote Hood Businesses

In this bad economy, there are a lot of low-cost side hustles brothas and sistas can set up to stack some decent paper. The thing cats need to keep in mind is that there is always an opportunity to make money. The number one reason why cats and this country are going broke is because cats are still expecting to make money off the same old hustles and in denial that the world and opportunities constantly changes.

One of the best hustles I can recommend to readers of my blog is setting up a promotion/marketing firm that uses the latest and greatest technology. Because marketing and promotion is the core of building an economic framework in the Black community through establishing a communication framework, this blog will be dedicated to showing how cats can setup these types of hustles. In this article, we are going to show cats how to use Facebook to help cats promote their business using a photo booth technology.

What is a Facebook Photo Booth?

A Facebook Photo Booth is a kiosk station that allows people to take a photo and it posted to Facebook and can be shared among their friends. This is a powerful promotion tool because it allows any customer that interact with the business be able to send a photo of themselves enjoying the spot and sharing that photo among their friends as proof. Then those friends will remember that photo, remember their friend was there and remember that business where the Facebook photo kiosk was at.

I discussed this on the blog in a previous article, but I want you to look at the two video below. In fact, you should notice they are actually telling you exactly how they do it and you better take notes on how they built the kiosk and replay and rewind if you have to:

Note: Please note on 1:48, they are using LED strips to have a lighted background at night to take pictures. This is very creative and effective! It is probably possible to use multi-color LED strips to have a colorful effect in a club setting.

You do not need to go the RFID wristband angle and it is not necessary. There is no need to store the user name and password of Facebook users. The way you going to set this hustle up is just post the image to a Facebook page or Facebook group and let cats share it from there. Keep that in mind and keep it simple.

Now the first thing you should realize is these videos are not in America, the United States, USA or whatever. I have to say it again, you brothas and sistas have to start looking worldwide for solutions and hustles to apply to your money making game. I’m the only real African-American in this game that is keep telling you cats that and when I come up with stuff like this, you cats want to act like I’m awesome when the truth is, you cats are not looking at where the money at and it all over worldwide in the 21st century so get a clue and catch up!

How to Setup the Facebook Photo Booth

The way you setup one of these Facebook photo booths is you have to create a kiosk station, setup software that take pictures and use the Facebook API and then put it in a nice location.

To build out a kiosk, the way to do it is get a mini-PC that you can attach to the back of a small LCD monitor. The picture below is a Zbox mini-PC that you can order online or get from Fry’s but you have to get the hard drive and I believe some other components to make it a whole computer:

This picture along should give you an idea how to start building kiosks and digital signage solutions for the hood. And in case you haven’t figured it out, this configuration is exactly how we will be setting up the retail POS system for the hood. Now, you should notice USB slots and what you do is attach a web cam to it and that is your core technology to run the kiosk.

Now, believe it or not, you can build the kiosk stand using wood or other board materials you can get at Home Depot or Lowes and even ex-felons and parolees who can’t find a job can make a career cutting up and installing these things with woodworking skills in the basement. Look at the videos above and look at how they create the kiosk container and you should see a hole for the web cam and a hole for the monitor. You can put an USB RFID reader in there if you want but that is not necessary at this time – keep it simple on your first try. You should have a wireless device like a USB dongle that you can insert in there or if it is remote, use a 4G wireless hotspot thing but make sure that thing is secure and don’t get real hot.

Note: You could probably get away with using a cheap $100 android tablet since all you doing is posting up pics and if it has built in wi-fi, then all the better. But I don’t know if you can root these cheap tablets.

Once you build out the kiosk, you will need software capture the photo and post the picture to Facebook. Quite frankly, this is so trivial that it’s embarrassing and the only reason you cannot create this software is because some of you are extremely lazy even though programming skills is the most easiest and biggest payout of all hustles. But because I know most of you are lazy about learning programming, I will program the software and post it up later for you to download. You just basically call the webcam, snap a photo and save it as a jpeg image in memory then you post the jpeg image to Facebook API service.

Facebook has a link that explain how to post the photo to their API at http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/rest/photos.upload/ and you can just use this code and again, I’ll program this for you brothas and sistas so you don’t have any excuses. I’ll use Dream and Hustle Facebook group as a prototype example to help you see it work.

Okay, now that you have the kiosk and the software, the next step is to find a good location to put the kiosk. The place you want to put the kiosk is like any other photo station and that is a place where people can take nice photos. For example, put the kiosk in the lounge area of a boutique so ladies can take a picture of them wearing shoes or a handbag and post it online for their friends to see. If there is a ladies hair salon, put up a kiosk where the ladies who just got their hair did can take a picture once their hair is done and post it to Facebook to show off their new hair. I hope you are seeing the opportunities here because that is the next topic.

Setting Up Your Facebook Photo Booth Side Hustle Business

I basically gave you the instructions on how to setup a promotional tool for a business that you can package up and sell to businesses in the hood to promote and market using their own customers to spread word of mouth very fast. This is the kind of next generation hustling that you cats need to be on that is being done worldwide but not here in America. You already got a first mover advantage by reading this article.

Now think about the kind of places you can sell this solution:

Night Clubs. You remember those ghetto club photos where cats at the club be standing in front of some spray painted sheet. Well, you can create a booth for that club that do that same thing and post up to Facebook instantly. The benefit to the club is they can create a photo album of their own patrons while their own patrons share the photos with their Facebook friends, increasing word of mouth marketing.

Events. Think about stuff like Black Bike Week, summer concerts, conferences where people can take photos of themselves and post it online. You don’t have to sell to the event organizers; you can sell this Facebook photo booth solution to probably a vendor that will be at that event to promote their company.

Retailers. This will help retailers and other storefront business promote their business if they can use customers and visitors to post online them shopping or doing things at their place of business. If someone created a business that put makeup samples on sistas, wouldn’t they want this Facebook photo booth to let that person share this to her friends?

Commercial Zones. This can help boost traffic in a commercial zone in the hood where the Facebook photo booth is on the street and people who are visiting the town can take a picture of themselves. You can create a “picture spot” for people to take pictures in front of a nice background and snap a photo and that promotes that community as a place others can visit.

These are just a sample of opportunities you can sell your Facebook photo booth as a marketing tool where you have a regular job and visit cats on the weekends or after work with your samples and demonstration. You charge them for setting up their Facebook page and installing and maintaining the kiosk and use the same template.

Summary

This is really content that will be on the Business Model Wiki in full detail but I wanted to just let cats see that there are hustles all around us we can get into if we want to make some side money and have a business going with little investment. Setting up a communication framework that consist of marketing and promotion is a top priority of Dream and Hustle and I have no problem giving this kind of information and software away for brothas and sistas to help our business and also start up a business on their own.

What is nice about this hustle is you can also create a Smart Poster that use QR codes and NFC stickers and have a real promotion/marketing firm that can deal with all kinds of clients. Let me tell you from experience – even if I put up the software for free to download, even if I make a YouTube video on how to create the kiosk and make templates on brochures and marketing material, 99% of the Dream and Hustle readers ain’t going to do ish but read this article. We brothas and sistas are some funny ass people that will wait to see another Black person stack money before being convinced and by that time, it’s too late because everybody else already jumped in.

Do some research around the web on this Facebook photo upload thing because I did see other web sites talking about how to set this up in different ways. I do not care about the like button because a picture is worth a thousand words and people can see and visualize a photo. It really is a great opportunity that cats are doing in other places of the world and something you can get started right here in America and have the first mover advantage. Why would any business not want to pay for this user-content generation promotion and marketing tool?