Journalistic long-lunches and curmudgeonly print unions resulted in this Victorian hardware hanging around well past its sell-by date. But when it finally was dumped in favour of new IT, electronic communications generally and ultimately the web, the techtonic plates shifted. The transformation was staggering and, as the new media just continued to evolve, hasn’t stopped since.
Consequently, while TTJ still hits readers doormats in three-dimensional paper form, it is written and laid out on screen and transmitted to a printer in Wales using presses that deliver a copy in seconds. The magazine is also a daily updated website, an email newsletter, a Twitter page and LinkedIn and Facebook sites. Sometimes all this feels like a voracious beast with a bottomless appetite for new information, but the payback in terms of immediacy, response and the ability to widen awareness of the TTJ ‘brand’ is incalculable.
And as our marketing focus this week highlights, much of this technology is also available for businesses to communicate, brand build and increasingly use as a sales tool .
Not renowned in the past for being at the forefront of communication and marketing, the timber sector’s initial steps into the new media age to some extent mirrored journalism’s. But, similarly, once it strode out, it advanced rapidly and has continued to pick up the pace. And that’s proving good, both for individual businesses, and the wider timber brand.
Take Hoppings Softwood Products, winner of the 2012 TTJ Excellence in Marketing and Website Awards for its online communications and sales strategy. Starting with its own website, it now embeds ‘satellite’ sites into its merchant customers’, equips them with internet shopping carts to sell their own products, and even builds websites for them.
The result, a boost to Hoppings’ online sales. Some of the leading marketing and PR experts working with the timber sector also highlight that the industry is no slouch when it comes to exploiting social media either and has major potential to use them further.
Consultant Liz Male simply keyed the word timber into business networking site LinkedIn and up popped nearly 12,000 related personal entries. Others from our expert panel explain how timber companies are exploiting the capacity of modern media to target specific customers, explain complex product sales stories effectively, or multi-purpose marketing or sales messages for various audiences.
Pan-industry organisations and initiatives are also following suit. The Wood Awards, for instance is using social media to encourage and promote entries, and online ‘pinboard’, Pinterest to instantly post entrants’ images. And Swedish Wood Preserving Association boss Mikael Westin explains how his organisation is using a ‘building a deck’ smartphone app to promote treated timber – a tool now being adopted and translated by the UK Timber Decking Association.
Under today’s non-stop new media barrage, there are inevitable moments of wistfulness for the clatter of real typewriters and whiff of boiling lead. But then you get a response to this morning’s online post from the other side of the world, your website clocks up its 50,000th page view of the month, and the good old days don’t look quite so good after all.
