When ARCHITECTURAL LIGHTING (@archlighting) sent tweets from the Solar Decathalon or provided real time reports from the Professional Lighting Designer’s Conference in Berlin (Oct. 28 through Nov. 1) with photos, links, and commentary, followers instantly received the information on their computers and smartphones.
Even manufacturers are getting on board with social networking and are beginning to see its benefit as a way for employees to connect to each other and to customers. “We started out with Twitter a year ago because even though each post is short, you can link back to the website,” says Jimalee Dakin, vice president of sales and marketing at Milwaukee-based Visa Lighting. A Visa staffer’s son (a young film-maker in Manhattan) tipped the manufacturer off to Twitter’s coolness. It then took a bit of convincing to get upper management on board. There were worries that the platform offered too much transparency, but a report on National Public Radio gave it legitimacy.
With its short posts, Twitter is perfect for mobile devices and effective for public relations and for use by sales personnel, so it is no surprise to find a number of manufacturers such as Peerless Lighting (@peerlesslight), Lighting Services Inc (@LSILighting), and Barbizon Lighting Co. (@barbizon) tweeting away. Dakin uses @visalighting to link up her sales reps in the field. “They can get a tweet on their phone right before they go into a sales meeting. It puts the idea of a new Visa product first thing in their mind,” she explains. At Lightfair, the Visa team hosted a “tweet-up,” which effectively gathered people at their booth to meet face-to-face.
It’s clear that social media’s strength as a business practice comes not just from online networking, but also from real world, offline events. “The connected, tech-savvy nature of lighting designers means that practitioners are never far from their handhelds and are hip to anything that speeds up the communication process,” says Jennifer Jones, IALD marketing and communications manager. “I don’t know that it is changing the profession itself, but it is certainly changing the way its practitioners interact with one another.”
