Last night I attended the 2022 Onkaparinga Business Awards presentation event hosted at the Mclaren Vale visitor center and by the lovely ladies behind Adelady. I expected to head out there, enjoy the free food, gin and icecream, then head home after rubbing shoulders with the owners of the best businesses the Onkaparinga region has to offer.
lo and behold I actually managed to win my category! SvenStudios was crowned as the ‘best artist, musician or creator’ in the city of Onkaparinga for 2022, and it’s all thanks to everyon who voted!
The award is given to the most voted for business in any given category – SvenStudios’ category being ‘Captivating creative services’ and then all the voted for businesses are given sub categories. So thankyou everyone who voted! Means a lot!
icecream
Winner onkaparinga business awards
SvenStudios with adelady
SvenStudios was originally placed in the ‘Marketing, Design and Media’ category, but then was changed to the ‘Artist, Musician or Creator’ category, which suited what I do better as the other finalists in the formaer category seemed to cater more towards other businesses, and corperate clients, while I focus on domestic photography, for familes and of course weddings!
I believe this was the first year where the awards has a specific category for artsists, or creators so it’s pretty awesome to win it at the 2022 Onkaparinga Business Awards! I had been entering and trying to agther votes over the past few years but never got to be a finalist until last night!
These past few years have been insanely hectic and stressful in the wedding industry, but everything is coming up Milhouse today!
It’s that time of year again, all the wedding industry awards are being held, and the ABIA awards are the one I put most stock in. The 2022 SA ABIA Awards saw SvenStudios once again rise to the top of the best wedding suppliers available in South Australia in all that we offer – Wedding Photography, Videography and Photobooth Hire. But the competition in this great state of ours is always super tight, which means we still have not achieved a winning gold star, despite getting close once again!
I managed to come away with a runner-up star with my photobooth hire service, while being a finalist in the wedding photographer and Videographer categories.
The way the ABIA Wedding Awards work is unique in that the awards are soley decided on the reviews recieved from previous wedding couples who have reviewd your services. Each couple give a score out of 100 in varying fields and it culminates into your final score.
In order to qualify as a finalist in the yearly awards, a wedding supplier must earn an overall score of over 95%, so just managing to be a finalist means that your couples have been absolutely estatic with your work – it merely comes down to some scores in the 99, and 98 range that decides the winner in each category.
It’s actually a little frustrating recieving an overall score of 98.69% for wedding photography, and 98.73% for wedding videography and still not winning the gold star in the 2022 SA ABIA Awards! But it just goes to show the amount of fantastic suppliers and competition out there in South Australia, and these scores mean that all my couples in the last year that voted are very pleased with my work! Which is the greatest award really.
Thankyou to all those who took the time to fill out the review form after every wedding – it’s the best thing in the world to hear such positive feedback from my couples and it keeps me going!
Particulary over the last few months where I’ve lost all my social media accounts due to identity theft and Facebook being Facebook. If you diddn’t know about that please do refollow me on my new social accounts! Means a lot!
Unfortunately one of the worst things that can happen to a creative sole trading business like SvenStudios happened last week, where all of our accounts related and linked to Facebook came under attack by a malicious third party.
I woke up to my mother in law frantically texting about inappropriate images appearing on my personal Facebook wall which in turn caused my accounts to all become disabled due to facebook policy. Looking at my emails it seems as though someone gained access to my business page and 6 minutes later all my accounts were disabled.
On the surface this seems like a reasonable thing for Facebook to do in order to protect users from horrible images that should not exist, and it’s pretty amazing it only took 6 minutes of them being posted to take them down. So well done to them.
However this takedown has also caused an automatic ban of all accounts linked to my personal account. This means my business Facebook page – which had 2.5k followers. My SvenStudios Instagram, which had 14k followers and also my other project pages and instagrams relating to StevenDuncanART.
Facebook disabled
Impossible to reactivate Facebook disabled accounts due to Policy
You’d think surely an organisation like Facebook would be caught up in this sort of thing rather often right? Should be an easy fix – their automated takedown of illicit material was needed, so all they need to do is reverse it while removing the material yeah? Wrong.
It turns out that Facebook, and Meta do not believe in customer service and would rather outsource all customer relations to Artificial Intelligence – ‘AI’. Any thing and everything you interact with when you seek out help direct from Facebook is AI.
There is a review process in place in order to keep the AI in check for any inevitible blunders which is – or used to be staffed by real people. However when trying to make use of the review service one is merely greeted with ‘We can’t Rewview the Decision to disable your account’
unable to review
New SvenStudios Social Media Accounts
Doing research around the web, and Reddit, the chances of having my accounts restored seems pretty bleak and pretty impossible to achieve. The only success stories for people in my situation have been people who know someone who works directly for Facebook. One example is handxmade who kind of got thier acocunts back, but not eithout firends help.
I have reported the hack and use of my accounts and posting of illigal images to the Police which I hope maybe in their contacts can achieve something positive, but Facebook has already done everything in their power to protect the innocent from their view, the disabling of my acocunts is simply collateral damage which is none of their concern.
if Facebook and INstagram werent as important for a photography business to operate, I would not have bothered with recreating my acocunts – however they most certainly are important, so you will find my new SvenStudios facebook page at https://facebook.com/svenstudiosphotography/ and my new instagram page at https://instagram.com/svenstudiosweddings/ Eventually once the original pages are taken down (as my onl Facebook page is still visible) I should be able to reclaim the original URLs.
There may be a slim chance for my Facebook Disabled accounts to be returned to me – but at the moment by the looks of the finality of any correspondance I have with Facebook – chances are slim. I’ll of course update this if anything changes.
On the 9th of December, the SA ABIA 2020 Wedding Awards were announced, and I’m happy to say SvenStudios has once again come out as one of the best wedding suppliers in South Australia! SvenStudios has come runner up in both the wedding photography and photobooth supplier categories, meaning that as judged by our delightful bridal couples throughout the last year – we were just pipped at the post in attaining the title of wedding phtogroapher and photobooth supplier of the year!
2020AbiaRunnerup
2020AbiaRunnerupPbooth
The ABIA awards are a nationally-run organisation that give awards to wedding vendors a little differently than many other awards organisations. As a photographer I tend to take the AIPP photography awards quite seriously as that organisation awards the technical prowess of a photographer in capturing a scene – where as ABIA awards wedding vendors based directly on the feedback of a business’ every day clients.
One is judged by professionals based on technical ability, where as the other is based on the personal experience that a client has had directly with the business.
As a result my previous year’s wedded couples rated their customer satisfaction with me at a whopping 99.8% which has ranked me as the runner-up at the SA ABIA 2020 Wedding Awards. I’ts a little bit dissapointing to miss out on top spot by such a small margin, but that’s just the way it goes I guess!
Thank you so much to all my wedded couples who took the time to register their recommendation and reviews! It always helps out a lot!
