Editor's Note: John Strauss Furniture Design, Ltd., created a contest give-away to promote showroom traffic in High Point... and promoted it using Twitter. The contest will be played out in real time at the show. John Strauss discusses the steps he took to leverage his exposure on Twitter.
Starting up a furniture making company and establishing an identity in a market seemingly saturated with choices calls for novel approaches, especially if you don’t have deep pockets. Social Media sites like Facebook and Twitter can quicken the process of communicating a brand’s identity because one can associate brand and ownership personality together. And there is no direct financial cost involved.
I was trained as an artist not a marketer, and have specialized in developing my handiwork with tools like planes and chisels not technological items like Blackberries and SEO optimization. But perhaps either out of necessity in a down economy or because of a natural curiosity to learn a new “trick”, I have found Twitter an incredibly powerful marketing tool to be able to reach potential customers and to form new networking alliances. But its most significant capability is in projecting a company’s identity outward without traditional advertising. In order to accomplish brand identity in this way the company has to take the risk of being open about who they are in the social media realm.
Our Company has not been around long. We didn’t have a well known brand identity. We had a need to reach potential customers but we didn’t have the funds to launch an advertising campaign. We saw these obstacles as opportunities.
I began to use Twitter reluctantly at the insistence of my office assistant. Because I have a lot of varied interests, from furniture to cooking to children to foreign affairs, etc., each of these becomes an opportunity to start a conversation and connect with an audience. That in turn becomes a chance to say something about who we are as a company. I became ‘addicted’ to the process and the possibilities.
The only way to “tweet” effectively is to be sincere. To be effective in the Twitter world, you must share of yourself in a personal way and not attempt to be a sales person first. Sales will evolve – if they do, because there is a sense of connection built up between the company – which is experienced as a person - and the client.
Twitter allows us to communicate who we are in real time. There is no press deadline and delay for the publication to arrive in the mail or on the newsstand. That means we can respond to suggestions, ask for opinions and seek assistance. It also means we can share expertise, discuss our personal day, and be supportive of our “followers”.
After establishing our persona over the course of several months on Twitter and selectively building up a network of over 700 furniture trade people, we decided to try an experiment that would test social media’s ability to go to another level. The thought was to integrate social media marketing and a “real life” trade show by creating a contest in connection to High Point that fully utilizes Twitter and the personal connections that arise from a trade show experience.
We decided to give away a small table during High Point Market week as way to bring attention to our product line as a first time exhibitor, to educated people about the concepts behind our designs and to try to take advantage of social media’s instantaneousness. Our contest will be shown in real time during Market week on a video monitor in our booth. Since entrants need not be present to win, others in the social media universe are going to be brought into our booth experience even if they are not physically in North Carolina.
I believe that social media like Twitter can enlarge our world of connections and help to burst through the bubble of disconnection that one sometimes feels in attempting to reach an audience that is invisible to us. I am looking forward to the results of this experiment.
John Strauss,
Owner; John Strauss Furniture Design, Ltd.
www.straussfurniture.com
Tel: 330-456-0300
High Point Showroom: Interhall #312 IHFC
On Twitter: www.twitter.com/johnstrauss