Week 10C: Cooments

I have commented on the blogs of Tiffany Lehman, Sophia Ludyjan, Antonio Russo

Week 10A: Newsletters for Email Marketing

In this weeks' post I will be discussing different strategies the Makers Space can use for email marketing that involve periodic newsletters, and I know just the kinds of things that would excite other makers to jump on board. Some content ideas could include:

• Welcome emails - 
• This will be important since patronage at The Makers Space is member based so there should be some up-front accessible information about the services we provide to each new member. The email would include links to rules, safety practices, obligations, resources, our calendar, and ways to get more deeply involved.
• Birthday/Holiday -
• This will be a great way to keep our members engaged and also make them feel appreciated. This being based on membership, and also being a community with similar passions, its important at least for me that this can feel like a family. These types of gestures foster that culture. Plus, it'd be cool to wrap an offer into this such as a free month of storage somewhere around the space.
• Technical Updates - 
• These emails are most likely going to be a necessity for the operability of the business since there will be a lot going on and sometimes things come, incidents happen, and members will need updates on this information (and not all bad). This can pertain to new equipment coming in, software updates, machine maintenance, outages, downages, upages (jk), etc. Updates like these will need to happen as they come but are still great marketing tools to current members because they can include cool alternatives that can promote less used equipment and further engage constituents.
• Monthly Newsletter -
• This where the life and excitement of The Makers Space can shine. In this newsletter we'll let people know what's new happening in the space, especially what sorts of cool things people are working on. There can also be a monthly tutorial rollout where we focus on a certain tool or process; wouldn't it be cool to learn how to temper metal?? This also doesn't have to be limited to members and can be for anyone interested in learning how to make. I feel like the monthly frequency also gives members enough time to actually produce content, and gives us achievable goals to meet.

Week 8B: Delving Into Twitter

This blog post will detail the Makers Space's first dive into Twitter. 

When initially creating the page, Twitter automatically drafts a list of potential pages/accounts to follow which I decided to go along with. Although, I'm considering doing a pruning of these initial follows as many are as relevant to the goals of the Makers Space. Part of this was that my initial search terms were too general, as I was limited to 'furniture' and 'design' which I can do better than. This is where the advanced search feature comes in handy. My initial search terms were the same as before but now I have the option to limit the search to an exact phrase such as "furniture design," "industrial art," and "design fabrication" all of which were much more specific and gets me closer to the people who would be interested in Maker services. These phrases yielded really good search results but when getting perhaps too specific ("industrial furniture design") then too few or no results begin to show up. The people that were turning up included designers, some fabricators, furniture stores, fabricators, and industrial artists and enthusiasts which were exactly my market. 

Lists on Twitter are similar to the aim of the advanced search results in that the object is to quickly get to the accounts relevant to achieving what goals you have for social media. The difference would be, put in relative terms, you pick the search term and that stands as the list title and then pick pages you follow (your results) to put into those lists. The utility comes in when you can actually use these lists to filter your feed to see just what user's pages are relevant to that specific search term you use. The ones I chose were furniture and industrial design. I was okay with making them general since I have yet to acquire the following that would require anything more particular. And this feature is pretty cool. I can quickly respond or retweet any page I want to gain rapport with. 

The most popular time to tweet is in the morning, probably between 8 am and 9 am since pacific time leads the other US time zones. This also would make the most popular time and heaviest opportunity for engagement around 11 am to 12 pm generally.