Posted 6. April 2009, 08:55 by Rob Punshon comments (1)
Category : Home   Industry developments

Well in a word… ‘yes’. This blog will explain how I not only directed relevant traffic to a freelance illustrators’ website, but also managed to generate editorial work for her based on online communication methods. It will also explore the problems and barriers to this process.

www.tinawebsterillustration.com was built using HTML and Flash by myself and the Illustrator (Tina Webster). Once the site was built and had gone live on the web the task in hand was to direct relevant traffic to the site which meant potential clients and interested parties. This included art editors of newspapers and magazines, graphic designers who may be interested in using her work, PR practitioners and also build her profile among fellow illustrators. No easy task considering neither of us knew most of these publics on a personal level… not yet anyway. The main objective was to generate hits on the website and as a result increase awareness among these key publics and generate commissioned works.

But before we start promotional activity…
A Google Analytics tracking code was set up on the website to measure number of hits and where these hits were coming from. It also tracked how long each visitor spent on the site and where they spent the most time. I monitored the data from the website during January 2009 without doing any form of online promotional activity to act as a control study. There were 12 hits in total over the month all of which were either direct traffic (7 visits) or from search engines (5 visits) which suggests that this was all based on word of mouth (WOM) advertising. All hits were recorded in the London and Leeds area (locations of friends and family).

Facebook and Twitter accounts were set up for Tina Webster Illustration in February 2009 however straight away there is a limitation in using these social networks. Neither would truly promote the work or website to relevant parties as neither myself nor Tina’s friends list included art editors of newspapers or designers. We may be able to generate awareness and support from friends and family to a greater extent but this would hardly result in commissioned work from the Times Newspaper or Vanity Fair for example.

Applying this method to larger companies wishing to promote products or services through Facebook would therefore need to spend time building up a network of potential clients and interested parties before promotion could begin. This would be a time consuming process which would also require a large amount of two-way communication between the company and potential clients.

There is also a legal issue connected to Facebook in that any work uploaded to the fan site I created would actually become the property of the social networking site. They would be free to use the work in any way they wanted. It would become public property in effect. Pieces of work are therefore safer being held back from Facebook in order to maintain ownership rights. A link to Tinawebsterillustration.com was placed to the fan site in order to get around this problem.

Searching for other illustration groups on Facebook was successful however most groups merely had a section for displaying work which, if you take the above problem into consideration is not the best approach to take. Facebook therefore has a limited use as a referral site.

Twitter, on the other hand was more useful. When typing in illustration in the ‘find people’ section I came across a profile called Illustration Mundo. This is a social networking site which allows illustrators and designers to upload an item of work and include links to their websites and a small summary about themselves. Members can become fans of each others’ work or join ‘style’ groups like cartoon, abstract or fine art for example. The ability to categorise work means you can find artists with similar styles and techniques and therefore also gain an idea of the competition on a global scale.

This niche type of social networking is very effective as firstly, it provides a specific location for relevant publics to look for illustration work in a style they are looking for and in a relatively easy way. This is mutually beneficial to all parties concerned and increases awareness and a profile within the illustration community. Secondly, the site is global and open to everyone. Anyone can upload a profile and pieces of work which are not constrained by legal or ownership issues. It is an open forum. The system relies on imagery as opposed to written text for communication. This breaks down language barriers as all that is displayed of an artist is their profile image and clicking on this sends traffic directly to that website. Additional information about a profile can be looked up by clicking on the ‘view profile’ section.

To increase awareness of Tinawebsterillustration.com I looked for similar styles within the site and after creating a profile, became fans of those particular artists in the hope that they would return the gesture and become fans of Tinawebsterillustration.com and provide links back to the profile I had created. It worked. Of the 11 illustrators I became a fan of, eight returned the favour. A newsfeed service that operates on the site also allowed others to see these links for a limited time period and it was during this period that the website received the highest amount of traffic and from the widest geographical reach according to Google Analytics. I had increased traffic from 12 hits in a month from one country, to 331 visitors covering 38 different countries over a one month period. The peak number of hits was during the time period that the links were located in the public newsfeeds over 5 days.

The addition to Illustration Mundo led to a commissioned piece of illustration by SuperSweet magazine in an article called Kidults and a commissioned illustration in the Guardian newspaper. Both were as a result of art editors finding Tina’s work on the site and then contacting her directly via email and phone respectively.

To create more links between different profiles and sites, I introduced a link to Tina’s twitter profile and also to her fan site I’d created on the Illustration Mundo profile and vice versa. This increased followers on the twitter account and also made a small increase of fans on the Facebook fan site. Less may have joined the Facebook group because visitors already had a link to the website and therefore didn’t feel any benefit of becoming a fan.

The next phase was to try and enter Tinawebsterillustration.com into Wikipedia. This site describes itself as a ‘collective encyclopedia’ written by volunteers which anyone can edit and add to. However this is not the case. After creating an account with the site and attempting to upload an article it was placed in a queue and eventually rejected on the basis of notability. Users are still free to edit existing pages however all new articles (which this was) need to fulfil certain criteria which include ‘editorial integrity’ from a ‘reliable source’. Although Tina Webster has now been published in newspapers and magazines, there is no online record of these illustrations apart from information that is already on her website, Twitter, Facebook and Illustration Mundo. Although the site claims to be a collective which anyone can contribute to this is clearly with restrictions in place and doesn’t allow complete freedom to upload any information. Going forward the only option would be to try to include images or short additions to existing wiki’s in the hope that this would increase web presence and eventually evolve her worthiness or notability of her own page.

In summary, the objectives were achieved. Traffic to the website was increased from 12 hits in a month to 331. Over 70% of hits were from referring websites with Illustration Mundo leading the way (145 hits) followed by Facebook (40 hits) and twitter in third (23 hits). Commissioned pieces were also generated by the use of social networking sites. Editors viewed the contact page of the website in order to get in touch with Tina showing that the process worked. This proves that social networking, depending on the social networking site used, can promote a product or service to relevant publics effectively. Looking to the future, I’ll look at more illustration specific networking sites to further increase links to the website and encourage further traffic to the site. The beauty of online communication is it can always be evaluated from a return on (time) investment perspective. Google Analytics is the tool that allows you to see the effectiveness of a campaign and break the process down. Without such a tool, this experiment would have been nowhere near as informative.