Education rather than design delivery can be the most time consuming challenge for web projects, as new clients with limited or varied social media practice slowly get to grips with their website’s functionality and their media commitments.
In this particular project we made an overt play for the use of social media to promote the initiative and the products that the Designer in Residence were exhibiting e.g. Pinterest, Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo etc. We knew that they would have to use them if they were to be successful on the internet, so we made them a feature of the identity in anticipation that they would have to use them!
We thought that certain tools would be quickly integrated whilst others would be much slower to uptake. What has been really interesting is that we incorrectly predicted which they would be. A number of the older designers we felt would love using Flickr and Vimeo to show photos of the project and tell stories about their work. However, after some reservations and discomfort at the thought of tweeting or writing longer format blog posts these appear to be the most popular.
The dilemma… what do we do with the the used buttons? Wait for them to create a Vimeo channel and a group Flickr account or lose them?