Sharing a Social Media Story from the Arts
I have been asked recently for more and more stories that revolve around from how I got started in social media to how I landed working professionally in social media for Best Buy Remix. Today, I am not going to give the whole picture, but I am going to share an anecdotal story about how I have leveraged social media in the past. This is also in partial response to a recent post by Chris Brogan called Pirate Moves- From Awareness to Extended Action Read Chris’ post and the story I am about to tell will make sense both from a storytellers standpoint and from a strategic standpoint.
Welcome back. Chris always has a ton of value to add to the community and it’s the very reason I link to him a lot. (good strategy on his part ..huh)
As many of you may know I am passionate about the arts, social media and community. I have utilized the drive of my passion to get me to where I am today working for one of the largest most successful retailers in the world. Here is an anecdotal story from my online woodturning business Magic Woodworks. You will see the progression I took to capitalize in a completely genuine way on the attention I had gained through social media tools.
Awareness & Attention
It was early the early days of twitter and I was relatively new to the service. I had been blogging and sharing my woodturned art out of Magic Woodworks for approximately six months. It would be valuable for you to know that my intention at the time was to be able to leave my job in a cabinet shop to do my woodworking full time. I had a long way to go, but one thing that I noticed was that as I shared my creative process, and used social media tools like flickr to post pictures of my work in progress that people were really starting to take notice of what I was doing with my woodturning. In fact my twitter follower number was rising quite rapidly and people were starting to write about my use of social media to create awareness around an art form many had never even heard of. Seth Godin talks about being a purple cow, well I turned into the purple woodturner gaining attention and awareness with each passing day.
Engagement
As I spent more and more time in front of the lathe (my power tool for creating the art) because of increased business or prepping for an art show, I found myself getting a bit lonely. I turned to twitter! I brought my computer out to my shop, draped some plastic wrap over it to keep the dust out and started tweeting about the things I was making. People were intrigued and interested. I noticed one day that my twitter follower count was at 499 followers so I decided to try and make an event out of number 500. I told my followers that I was at number 499 and that I would send a hand made wine bottle stopper to the 500th follower as well as to whoever referred that follower to me. The twitter-sphere was a buzz very quickly and in no time I had not only added that one follower needed but easily 60 more folks who were interested in the process. At this point I could have dropped the whole thing, sent the wine stoppers to the winning parties and called it a successful passionate awareness campaign ~ But I didn’t
Execution
I decided a few hours after the twitter buzz that I would contact the two folks getting the wine stoppers and tell them that not only would I send them the stoppers, but if they could come up with a good time; I would create the stoppers live for them using Ustream. I was about to create a live streaming event from an event on twitter and I knew people would be engaged. We chose the next saturday morning to run the live event and I told people that not only would I be making the two free stoppers, but I would also take requests and would turn wood the entire weekend live on-line! When I flipped the switch to go live saturday morning I was greeted by at least fifteen people in my chat room eagerly awaiting the live show to start and I was having a ball! Without getting into the details of the entire weekend, I did 7 live shows and pulled in enough orders and sales to purchase a brand new lathe that would serve me really well in my business moving forward. Until then I had been working on a lathe that was not built for the amount of use and torture that I was putting it through.
Extended Execution
During the weekend of live streaming I had many, many visitors to the chat room. Many of them content producers and bloggers. They were interested in how I was using social tools to create awareness and sales for my small woodturning business. People were fascinated by the process of the art and I did many interviews in the coming days and weeks. This really kept the buzz high and introduced many hundreds or even thousands of others to what I was doing, including a story in the local Buffalo Newspaper.
Takeaways for Social Media
1. Engage people with what you are passionate about
2. Create awareness and attention with methods (tools) that suit your audience and product (Mine were photos, text and video)
3. Be creative with your engagement. Think outside the box and create events for people to gather around.
4. Everyone has to eat. Figure out a way to leverage your passion so that people will value and pay for your product or service. You shouldn’t have to shove it down their throat. People understand that their is an exchange of value for value.
5. Finally, go back to Number 1. If your not passionate about what your doing. Don’t do it! You’ll be better off following your heart and your passion than you will be struggling against the tide.
I would love to hear your thoughts. Does this teach you anything about the ways that you can implement social media tools for your business?
Keith Burtis is a social media and digital marketing professional. If you or your company are looking to REV THE ENGINE on your digital efforts contact Keith today! Specialties include: Blog design/Integration, Custom Facebook Pages, Social, Digital and Interactive Content strategies.
Comments
Keith,
This is EXACTLY what I was talking about. Fantastic story using the five steps Chris wrote about. I like how you executed it – that’s often the hard step for me.
Thank you!
@debworks
Steve, thank you for the comment. Glad you liked it.
Deb, Glad it served up what you were looking for.
Keith – fantastic post! Love how your passion for this space comes through so eloquently in your prose. You exhale socmed understanding. Thank you!
This was an amazing story! I kept thinking about what @GaryVee does with his WineTV Show – The only seller of wine I know that has a Hollywood Agent!
Will you be doing any more shows?
I hope Chris links to this story as an example of his “pirate moves”. It’s an outstanding example.
I especially liked this line “Figure out a way to leverage your passion so that people will value and pay for your product or service. You shouldn’t have to shove it down their throat. People understand that their is an exchange of value for value.”
Thanks for tracking me down 
Sharon Prentice I am thinking that there (not their) needs to be some people out there (not their) who need to share their (not there) grammar expertise with the world so that your (not you’re) writing can be more grammatically correct, and you’re (not your) not embarrassed when someone makes a comment such as this.
Sharon Prentice Please ignore my comment about grammar; my husband indicated that I showed my ignorance (true!) of the blogging scene by attempting to point out some grammar issues, and by the way, I enjoyed the example of how a person can use social media to evolve a business.
Zena – Thanks for the comment, and awesome to see you at SXSW.
Melody – Thank you and no problem.
Sharon – Yup, I have a lot to learn, but I’m writing a lot more. No reason for me to be making large grammar mistakes. I appreciate the comment. However, it is true that at times I write way too quickly. I should edit more.
Keith, great story. It very effectively ties out Chris’ points.