Camilla Kitty Painting
Camilla d’Errico is a popular lowbrow painter with a burgeoning career in comics as well. Camilla first launched her website in 2005, complete with a small online store. She was going to a few conventions every year to meet fans and to promote her work but wanted to reach a wider audience for her art.
Two years ago her sister, AdaPia d’Errico left her job in the finance industry and began working on a strategy to increase her brand awareness. AdaPia added a blog feature to the website and an opt-in box so fans could sign up for their mailing list. They started a MySpace page and began updating it regularly. Next they signed up for Facebook and created a fan page and attracted about 1200 fans in about a year. When AdaPia signed Camilla up for Twitter in March of 2009 and began actively engaging with people between those two platforms, things really took off.
Camilla’s appearances at shows convinced AdaPia that fans craved a personal connection with the artist and a real desire to feel they “know” her. By summer they were giving fans that personal connection via Facebook and Twitter in a very creative and intuitive way. They reached out to Camilla’s peers in the art world and invited them to join her in conversation on Facebook and Twitter, thereby giving fans an inside seat to artistic conversations between fellow artists. These casual conversations, held in public, were very popular with fans. Camilla’s blog and MySpace accounts took a backseat as her Twitter and Facebook fan page became more interactive. They used the blog, now, to announce major events and began to post visual material instead of blog posts. They were learning what Camilla’s fans wanted by listening carefully to the conversations and paying attention to where the most interaction occurred.
They became even more active on the Facebook Fan Page, thanking people for becoming fans, giving them updates on milestones reached, artistic works in progress, photos of comic work not yet finished and rewarding fans with insider information about the artist, her work and her life. They were creating a passionate community of fans.
They saw a significant increase in their online store sales by Fall 2009 and by the third quarter of 2009, a simple Google search for Camilla d’Errico yielded twice the results from a similar search in first quarter 2009. People were talking about Camilla everywhere.
They took their social media marketing strategy one step further and began crowd sourcing opinions on which designs they should use for clothing they were creating for a winter launch. Some of their posts yielded more than a hundred comments and all of that engagement caught the attention of the friends of their fans. They not only asked for suggestions in their crowd sourcing but they took those opinions to heart and made the clothing. In December 2009, they announced the launch via a blog news blast, Facebook fan page posts and tweets. Sales were great.
Since launching their social media strategy on Facebook and Twitter, Camilla’s fan count has risen 300% to more than 4,100 fans and grows steadily every day. “The most important part of what we do is that we have FUN,” says AdaPia. “We put ourselves in the fans’ shoes; we take the celebrity and bring her to them as a friend, a real person that they want to get to know, support and feel like they are a part of her success.”
Camilla and AdaPia have learned that the tone and language they use in social media impacts their sales. AdaPia says, “After a couple of sales-type posts we noticed the ‘chill’ and ceased immediately. You can ‘feel’ the effects of your work online without needing to check analytics.”
What’s next for them?
- They’ll be adding new social media tools to their strategy with Flickr and YouTube
- They have plans to take video at conventions and events.
- They’ll create photo sets of Camilla’s work and add those to Flickr so fans can find and browse her work easily.
- They are also using some specific social media sites designed just for artists like Deviantart and Behance.
Social media has become a cornerstone of their promotional efforts and they both feel it is the next best thing to meeting fans live at conventions.
What are you doing to create conversations about YOU?
