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30 | Kitchen & Bath Design News | June 2015 By Jamie Gold, CKD, CAPS Trend Spotting H ow many hours did you spend blogging last week? How many projects did you upload to Houzz, share on your Face- book page, Instagram, pin or tweet? How many non-cat YouTube videos have you posted, viewed or shared in the last month? Designers, manufacturers and retailers are all heavily involved in social media, and the landscape has changed dramatically from when you first discovered MySpace on your teenager's computer a decade ago. What hasn't changed is that you still need to fnd what works best for your brand; there is not a one-size- fts-all for everyone or every category. That being said, here are some trends from the social media front that might ft your needs this season. FOR DESIGNERS Done smartly, social media can be a powerful marketing tool for kitchen and bath designers. Leslie Carothers, a Houston-based design industry veteran, founded The Kaleidoscope Partnership eight years ago to bring social media know-how to the design world. Today, all of her clients are designers. "It is very easy to use social media to get your work published and to net- work with major online infuencers. It is also very easy to launch a new service using social media advertising," she shares. Here are Carothers' top social media picks for this industry segment: » » Houzz is excellent for designers who want consumers to view their portfolios and potentially hire them. It has become the de facto place where consumers search frst for design services. » » Pinterest and Instagram are both well known, and when the de- signer understands the power of hashtags on either platform, they can be powerful ways to drive traf- fc to their Web sites and blogs. » » Twitter is excellent for meeting brands and editors on the various chats held there. » » YouTube, when done well, can drive a lot of trafc to a designer's site or blog and is unbeatable for telling a visual story quickly. » » Facebook Pages take an ad budget to work these days, but they are excellent for getting in front of lo- cal or regional consumers, if the advertising is targeted properly and done over time. » » Linked In is also a very useful way for designers to exchange peer-to- peer information. » » Carothers is also a believer in blog- ging for designers, as it makes them easier to fnd for clients seek- ing services, and can support their strategy and goals. Paying for social media is a hot topic among designers. Carothers believes that it's worthwhile for bet- ter positioning on target-rich sites like Houzz for the designer seeking new clients online. Houzz reports that there are 21,000 U.S. and Canadian kitchen and bath designers and remodelers on their site; being seen frst in your area can provide a competitive advan- tage. Facebook is another platform in which pay- ing to get your business page seen is pretty much required for exposure. Another hot topic surrounding so- cial media is whether it's a valuable use of precious hours. "The biggest misconception designers have about social media is that it takes too much time," Carothers says. "It only takes too much time when you don't have a strategic plan in place and are using it to talk with your friends or get lost in inspirational images," she adds. FOR MANUFACTURERS Savvy brands naturally followed their specifers and end users online to these new social media platforms. They learned over time that there were signifcant diferences between social media and traditional media – i.e., talking with, rather than just at, the viewer. The smart ones have suc- cessfully adapted. High-end faucet brand Brizo was one of the earliest. The company's large-scale foray into social media began with creating one of the industry's frst blogger events, (perhaps the frst for a manufacturer). It invited Paul Anater, creator of the Resi- dential Kitchen and Bath Design blog, to its bi-annual Fash- ion Week event in 2009, after one of its agency executives discovered his blog. Anater's enthusiasm and social media postings inspired Brizo and its agency to ask him to develop a list of bloggers to include at the frm's next Fashion Week program. Thus was born the Blogger 19, and the industry's increasing appreciation for the power of designer blogs. "We really saw an opportunity to engage the interior designer audience in a way that helped infuential designers tell our story to their designer colleagues and friends," shares Jai Robinson, one of the blog event's creators and Brizo's senior channel marketing manager. Social Media in the Kitchen and Bath Industry Brizo uses its Blogger 19 events to get designer feedback for its new products. This illustrates one of the 21,000- plus kitchen and bath pros on Houzz. A tweet led to a national magazine cover for one designer. Photo: Houzz Photo: The Kaleidoscope Partnership Photo: Brizo®