Social media advocacy marketing just doesn’t work for design firms. The content being posted is just too subtle, or too confidential, and the stakes far too high. After all, what employee of an architectural firm in his right mind would risk blogging, sharing, tweeting or posting about a project voluntarily on his own Facebook page, or Twitter account? It’s…
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How Does She Do It
by Louis Postel, originally published in New England Home | August 2016: In Our Backyard The eye moves up the curtain in search of where its pattern repeats. Finding repeats becomes a kind of game. Where to find the next line of peacocks, trellises, and inky down strokes? – It’s a visual game that can become a needless distraction.…
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Publish My Project!
Dear Louis: I’m feeling pretty down about a snafu here in our design studio, and I am hoping you can help me out. Eighty-six days ago exactly – I counted – we sent photos of a zero energy, a shingle-style project we did to glossy Magazine X, hoping to get it published. Despite our follow up calls and ever-so-polite inquiries,…
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Welcome to the New New England
Wealthy people from abroad, high-tech entrepreneurs, thousands of moneyed folk are discovering New England: its frothy mix of culture and clam chowder. Not only are they discovering, they are settling in – buying up houses, condos and pied a terres, recharging that culture as they go. Designers and architects are adapting. The design vocabulary of new money’s characteristically baroque, artistic-leaning…
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Low Engagement
Why this column on marketing your firm and your projects through social media? We’re glad there’s so much great work coming to this blog, but we also worry that all that fine work might not be getting the amount—and especially the kind—of publicity it deserves. Social media offers an unprecedented opportunity to get the word out about architecture. It’s…
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Social Media Marketing Tip 109: Getting Great Clients
Follow these three simple steps to attract the perfect client through social media. Though they may sound absurd, they’ve worked for others. 1, Picture a perfect albeit flawed client, and write about him or her or them in a stream of consciousness style. Here’s an example of how this might begin: “My ideal client lives five miles away from my…
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Cliché Riddance
This coming year, let us resolve to make even better use of social media in engaging others and building relationships critical to our business. Moreover, let us acknowledge that social media itself is changing, and that quality content is steadily eclipsing the many marketing gimmicks out there meant to automatically increase our volume of “friends” and followers. One prompts us…
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Trade Only Tip 106: Social Media Leadership in 2 Steps
Ideas about leadership are changing fast. From the Lee Iacocca “my way or the highway” model, we are recognizing the immense value of the leader who quietly makes a safe space in which to work and to get a job done right. We are talking about the kind of design professional who can orchestrate colleagues, partners, clients, subs, vendors, craftsmen,…
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Ready to End Social Capital Punishment?
Have you ever written a message to someone on Facebook or LinkedIn and heard nothing back? It happens a lot and yet it’s still aggravating, like someone not returning a phone call, refusing to make eye contact, or ignoring an offer to shake hands …
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Latest Workshop Feedback
Interior designers like most visual artists think in color pictures. Louis Postel’s course on social media encourages… Posted by Postel Ink on Saturday, November 21, 2015
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Short or long posts on social media?
Here’s the skinny from the best selling author andrew macarthy on creating long vs. short posts and profiles: “…Studies like these will have covered a spectrum that includes text-heavy posts with low engagement that are often the result of poor writing practices, and short posts like memes that only generate lots of cheap, low quality engagement. My advice is to put…
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Trade Only Social Media Workshop Registration Links | Venegas, Roomscapes, Wolfers
Register for Venegas Nov 17 Register for Roomscapes Dec 2 Register for Wolfers Jan 13, 2016 ➡ .2 CEU ➡ limited attendance ➡ $59.00 ($69 for credit) per workshop
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Feeling stuck around Social Media?
I have been writing and blogging about design for over twenty years and I can still feel that way – blocked! That’s one of the reasons I started the Writing Well Workshop Series, Part 2 of which is How to Make Friends and Influence People through Social Media marketing. (Nov 17 at Vanegas, Suite 620 in the Boston Design Center.…
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The “About Us” Handshake, ABX Boston 2015
Social media marketing is all about engagement. ➡ Learn how to greet your online visitors right from the start by “looking them in the eye” and offering a firm handshake with your About Us website page. Join New England Home’s Trade Secrets columnist and social media marketing coach Louis Postel in this interactive workshop. On the one hand…
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Do you and your clients speak the same language?
Designers and architects are particularly adept at using a visual language to describe what’s going on in a space. Their vocabulary is color, form, volume, texture, light and shadow. But for others — even the most well-educated clients — this particular vocabulary has little meaning. So how do you get across your ideas and accomplishments in a way that does…
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Designer Feedback
In August and September, 2014, I was able to attend three writing seminars led by Louis Postel. They were excellent. First of all, I was so pleased to see that such seminars were being offered. I happen to have a background in writing and enjoy it. However, I have been a practicing interior designer for the last ten years. Louis…
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Good Works | The 1993 Aids Crisis
A TIP OF THE CAP Designing for Children with AIDS from Design Times, April 1993 ♦ ♦ ♦ Text: Sarah Wright | photography David Foster Driving onto the grounds of the old Matapan Hospital in Boston is like driving onto the grounds of St. Elsewhere. There is a flat, dry field in front; on the left are two sagging clapboard houses; in the…
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Writing Well Is Our Community Service
“They laughed when I sat down to write a résumé…” “Then I got a good-paying job…” How do you feel when a job application asks you to “tell us about yourself,” or an advertisement requires you to email a résumé and cover letter? How comfortable are you writing a memo to your boss, a report, or proposal?
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The Primal Design Motive
What are our basic needs? Abraham Maslow created a hierarchy that later researchers have refuted. The upshot is that design may be far more important than food, shelter or sex. Indeed. Dear Chip Conley: Why are we still talking about Maslow whose motivation theories were refuted years ago? This by his very own Harvard student among others: see David…
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Has Traditional Marketing Hit a Dead End?
Upscale, discriminating consumers zip through TV advertisements. Listen to commercial-free online and satellite radio. Check Caller ID before answering a telephone. Deploy ever more effective pop-up blockers and spam filters. That’s why one old/new form of marketing has proven so valuable at breaching the shields put up by today’s hype-weary and hyper-wary shoppers.
