So I have entered the realm of social media.

Let me back up and give some context – almost 37 years ago, on a sunny summer day, I was born…  Just kidding, I won’t go that far back – only about 3 years ago:  Dylan and I had just moved to sunny Southern California from not-so-sunny Vancouver 2 years prior and were still on the “we’ll stay 3 years and then go back” track, when we were approached by a retailer who was interested in our furniture and home accessories we had designed way back when we were fresh out of Architectural Grad school.  So we talked about it for about 10 minutes, and decided to re-start our design company (studio north design).  Long, complicated, fraught with high’s (our Block and Board Modular Shelving was photographed in the only Oscar Neimeyer designed house built in the US) and low’s (half of our first shipment to the retailer’s warehouse suffered catastrophic damage during shipping) story short, we survived the first year, and then the second.  We were blessed and cursed with only one client.  On one hand, my biggest problem was figuring out a way to make of our pieces fast enough to fill the ever-increasing number of backorders.  On the other, I never got around to looking for my back up, when things went pear-shaped (which they inevitably do).  Somewhere along the way I acquired a decent sized workshop with spray booth, machinery, pallets of buttery douglas fir in various shapes and sizes, and many, many, many grey hairs.

And then the breakup.  It was not unlike a breakup I had in grade 11, the relationship just sort of petered out.  No acrimonious blow out, just lots of miscommunication, “you’ve changed”, “no, you’ve changed” back and forth and the retailer and I went our separate ways.  So – now what?

Enter the retail store at http://www.studionorthdesign.com, and my re-entry into the world of Facebook.  I did have a Facebook account a few years ago, but was a little freaked out by the randomness of people I was running into – people from high school I haven’t talked to in twenty years, undergrad, grad school, summer camp, and the list goes on.  And frankly I was a little unsure about the whole Facebook etiquette thing, so I deactivated my account.  Then about a year ago, we were skiing in Tahoe with some friends and I was cajoled into re-activating my account.  Since then I have been working hard to broaden my number of friends – I have gone from 9 to 13 to my current figure of 28 (!).  So how does that relate to studio north design?  Well, I’ll tell you –  in the course of my re-entry into Facebook, and the whole social media thing, I feel like I’m in one of those movies where the main character wakes up and finds themselves 500 years into the future and people can teleport themselves around, and no one works because everything is done by robots.  Not only have I had to re-acquaint myself with the personal/social side of Facebook, but now there is all this stuff out there that goes along with that – apps, business pages, groups, networks, “like this” buttons for your website, “like this” buttons for your Facebook page.  Suddenly it’s not just about finding someone you went to highschool with, it’s about reaching out, networking, marketing, putting yourself out there!

And that’s the point where I start to feel like I am standing in a crowded room, in my underwear.  It’s the “putting yourself out there” aspect to this that I find challenging.  I mean, it’s one thing to update your status to your 28 friends, and it’s another to promote your blathering on your blog, or to advertise sales on your website through the business Facebook page.  Don’t get me wrong, I am truly thankful that I have 3 people who like the studio north design Facebook page,  (thanks Ayme, Val and Jen), but I don’t think they will round out my fiscal projections for the year…  So in addition to all the administrative, legal, manufacturing and traditional marketing tasks I have had to get a handle on in the past three years, it looks like I’ll have to brush up on my social networking skills.  I guess I’ll have to get some new underwear…