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designer

I’m heading up to Boston this week to see our staff at New England Home and to do a presentation at a networking event about how the design community can use social media to help grow their businesses.

Pulling the presentation together has been fun and has given me an excuse to spend time browsing Facebook, Twitter and the web at large to see what some high-end design professionals are doing.

High-end design is so intensely visual and satisfying on one hand, and so much about the intersection of aesthetic and personality on the other. Designers have been using the web for a while as a useful place to present their portfolios, but vefairley blog.jpgry few are able to communicate the breadth of their vision and their personality through their static marketing sites.

Social media can give them the tools, the venue and the opportunity to share their personal vision in a more intimate way with a larger group of people.

In looking around for examples of design professionals who are using social media to these ends, I stumbled across Tobi Fairley, a designer in Little Rock, AR. (We publish At Home in Arkansas, based out of Little Rock. It’s also the town where my grandfather grew up and a place I really enjoy visiting.)

Fairley is doing afairley twitter feed.jpgn terrific job using social media to give us a look into what she is seeing, what she likes and what she’s doing. A prospective client who has interacted with Fairley across the multiple platforms she uses is going to have a good sense of who she is and how she works. This is the kind of connection that can create confidence in hiring someone for an expensive, personal service.

Take a look at Fairley’s body of social media work.

Her blog: http://tobifairley.com/blog/.

Her Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/tobifairley.

Her Tumblr feed: http://tobifairley.tumblr.com/.

You can also find her on Facebook. It’s a good social media footprint that she’s tending very well and is sure to help grow her business.

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A panel discussion was held today at the Hearst Tower, the beachhead of House Beautiful, to discuss whether shelter magazines can survive the recession.

It’s an interesting question. With our network of local and regional home design magazines, we’ve seen a sharp drop off in advertising since last October, as local retailers and distributors have responded to the pullback by consumer by significantly curtailing advertising.

Folio: has a good summary of the roundtable. The traditional media people on the panel talked about how to follow consumers online while replicating the experience of the print magazine.

The designer Mitchell Gold made the case for multiple media in marketing programs, and cautioned the media members on the panel to not stray too far from what they do well.

Gold, an advertiser in online and print, said both mediums are still evolving. “Print is changing and online is still figuring out what it’s supposed to look like,” he said. “We recognize that people are doing more than just one thing. Even the most tech savvy people are carrying and reading magazines. Either way, media should focus on doing what it does well, and not tchotchke it up when things get bad.”

The Folio: piece is followed by a comment from a designer who was at the panel. It’s striking.

I was at this panel discussion this morning. Stephen Drucker called House Beautiful an “authority.” Apartment Therapy is a community. That is what struck me. I think both publications have a strong and focused niche, each different, each intensely aware of who their audience is, and a niche is good. I think in both situations, whether mostly community oriented or authoritative so to speak, increased value will surely be had and maintained in large part by increased contributions of design professionals as seen within the editorial content…architects, interior designers, kitchen designers (such as myself) and other specialists (key word) have much to offer.

A media brand today can’t afford to position itself solely as an authority. Ultimately, the community is going to disenfranchise your brand if you can’t connect with them.

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