To Twitter or not to Twitter? That is the question. Assia Benmedjdoub gets the latest.
Marie Claire tweets. Rosemount Australian Fashion Week tweets. Ragtrader tweets. Cotton On tweets.
In a nutshell, “tweets” are messages containing 140 characters or less, which are posted on the free social networking and micro-blogging service known as Twitter. When Ragtrader first compiled a report into social networking websites earlier this year, the response from fashion retailers and designers was unprecedented.
We want to know more.
For instance. With consumer fashion magazines now embracing these platforms as part of their coverage, are brands losing control of the way they are being presented to the public?
Ragtrader pitches your questions (and ours) to two new media experts via an online messaging service. Below is an edited transcript of a conversation between Assia Benmedjdoub (AB), Patty Huntington (PH) and Kate Vandermeer (KV).
AB: Patty, I’ll start with you. What online media platforms do you use as a fashion journalist?
PH: Blogger is the platform that I use for my blog. Additionally I also use Twitter and Twitpic – a photostream application that is connected to Twitter. I am about to swap this for an alternative because I don’t like the loss of control over TwitPic, which runs its advertisements. For video I use Qik live streaming video and for standard video Vimeo, which is, in my opinion, superior to YouTube because the video quality is better.
AB: And it’s not just bloggers – mainstream fashion titles such as Marie Claire and Vogue Australia have recently embraced platforms such as Twitter.
PH: I don’t think Vogue has used social media well at all to be honest. They were very late to jump on Twitter and hilariously, several other fake Twitter accounts had been set up ahead of them. They don’t have a very big presence on Twitter either, unlike Marie Claire, which has a dedicated mobile editor and is really trying to gun it in social media.
AB: These platforms have really revolutionised the nature of live reportage in particular,
haven’t they?
PH: Twitter has provided much faster delivery of information from fashion shows. We saw it first in a big way at the fall/winter 2009/10 shows in New York , then again at each successive event. Rosemount Australian Fashion Week spring/summer 2009 was regarded by some as a bit of a watershed. We saw a flood of people on Twitter and a vast amount of info being provided. Some of it wasn’t particularly interesting. And some hated it. Plenty of people loved it, however.
I’ve used a service called Cover It Live (CIL) on numerous occasions this year. It’s a live dialogue box that you can embed into a blog or website and which provides an instant messenging-type chat with readers. Used by several large media outlets, including The Huffington Post and news.com.au here in Australia, I believe when I covered the Golden Globes in January, it may have been the first time it was used on a fashion blog. I had certainly never seen it used anywhere else and at least two other fashion blogs subsequently picked up the idea. I then used it again for the Academy Awards and after that, both the D&G and Dolce & Gabbana live stream fall/winter 2009/10 runway shows and Gareth Pugh’s “live” fall/winter 2009/10 show – which turned out to be a video presentation, but which was nevertheless streamed live.
For the three fashion shows, I teamed up with two other bloggers – Bryanboy and Matt ‘Imelda’ Jordan. Instead of just adding them as producers on my CIL dashboard (which allows other parties to moderate comments and add photos etc), I gave them the embed code for the dialogue box and they added it to their blogs. So on each occasion the dialogue box ran simultaneously on all three blogs, which dramatically expanded the audience. It was certainly a lot of fun. You can feed up to 12 Twitter feeds into CIL so all three of us were reporting on Twitter and that commentary was going straight into the dialogue box. It’s a bit hectic flicking between everything while you’re observing the proceedings that you are reporting on, moderating comments, adding pics etc but a lot of fun.
AB: What about the brands themselves?
PH: Dolce & Gabbana is probably the most progressive in social media terms of any international luxury marketer. Who else has live streamed their fashion shows to the net? They also have a great website called Swide which has compelling content. A few other brands are dabbling. Most have Facebook pages but that’s not enough. Burberry used multiple platforms for one men’s fragrance launch and is looking seriously at social media.
KV: Smaller niche brands are doing some interesting things on Twitter, where they are building communities online that filter through to their offline retail stores or their stockists. I particularly liked the fact Australian boutique player Fat used Hayley – a fashion blogger and photographer in Melbourne – to blog about their ‘Fat loves’ campaign. Chain retailer Sportsgirl just employed a full-time online editor to moderate their forums, upload new content and make their blog newsworthy. Metalicus are trying to establish more of a suitable online relationship with their demographic without being too “over the top”. The picture is looking brighter – when I was doing research and development for a previous position, I found that many Australian retailers believed that an “online presence” was literally their own website.
AB: Have there been any gaffs?
PH: It’s an incredibly exciting new world and marketers have every reason to be optimistic – at the end of the day you still have to have good product. All that has changed is that a brand new media arena has opened up. I’ve found it fascinating to watch even big companies such as Versace, who obviously have a very keen sense of branding, totally lose the plot when it comes to new media. Versace recently had some low-profile photographer tweet backstage from their men’s show – no Versace branding, no promotion and the guy didn’t understand the medium at all.
KV: Just like if you have a new blog post, you would advertise the new blog post through Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, an e-newsletter. Chanel have created an iPhone application that shows their catwalk parades in high quality, like you are in the front row. If Chanel uploaded a new show, they should be letting their database know through an e-newsletter, at the POS when purchasing, through their sales people, through their website etc.
AB: Is new media as relevant for brands pitched at more mature-age markets?
PH: The over 40 demographic has been the fastest growth segment on Twitter. Much of the technology that is currently being used has been pioneered by Gen X and the Boomers.
AB: Blogs, Twitter, Youtube. How do companies quantify these in terms of return on investment?
PH: It’s pretty obvious that that is an issue – companies think new media is just smoke and mirrors. What they don’t realise is that there are plenty of measurement and new media monitoring tools that they could be using now to see what is being said about their brand in social media and who is leading the discussion. I spoke with a luxury publicist last week who complained about how inadequate Media Monitors has become, because it provides no filters. I told her about Nielsen’s BuzzMetrics [online measurement tool].
KV: I’ve got a great example with Twitter. I went into a Forever New store in Chadstone when checking out the new developments. I saw a gorgeous leather jacket and took a photo with my iPhone, tweeted it and linked the picture with the price saying how fab it was. Apparently, Forever New had a great response with sales increasing as a result. The PR who discovered this on behalf of Forever New found out through Twitter by monitoring Forever New on Twitter.
AB: Will this kind of activity go on to change the nature of fashion advertising?
PH: At the moment most blogger advertising is what’s called affiliate advertising, where bloggers essentially give a free plug to an advertiser in exchange for a small cut of any sales that are made when readers click through to the main site. There is already a reaction against that. Vogue doesn’t get paid via commission from Prada when Prada advertises with Vogue. Prada pays for branded display advertising and the same thing is starting to happen online.
KV: Budgeting for new media initiatives is all relative. Have they done any offline media? Has it worked? If not, reduce that portion and try allocating more to online. The best bit about online media is it’s measurable. As Patty has said, there are actually ways and software to prove it’s working, as opposed to billboards, print media etc. I think brands need to have a healthy balance of both online and offline. There is a danger or not creating a “real experience” if 100 per cent of the budget is online.
AB: What about education?
KV: This will definitely need to be added to new curriculums. I’ve been asked to be a part of the steering committee for [Melbourne university] RMIT’s diploma fashion course in regards to running an online course for e-commerce and media. So there are educators out there realising this gap in the market for educated digital operators across all platforms. The risk they run is technology adapts at such a pace that educators and schools may need to more flexible to keep up.
PH: I was recently asked to talk to the fashion marketing students at Raffles in Sydney. These kids are not yet on the market – it is going to take some time before students make their way into the marketplace. Meanwhile, the PR industry is being run by people who have done things a certain way for the past 20 years. I think marketers and publicists have dramatically underestimated both the reach and the influence of new media-specialist journalists. They have either thought it’s a flash in the pan or that the new media independents don’t “count” because they are independent, and all the publicists have cared about so far is legacy media and getting a plug in a big mainstream publication.
AB: Kate, looking ahead, how do you see retailers embracing social media platforms in the future?
KV: I think our phones will hold all our favourite data on it in an even more sophisticated way than we do now. We will be able to shop collections online, choose what we want and find out more about that brand, where it was made and get online styling tips all from one platform for mass brands – some progressive brands are dabbling in this now.
The Panel
PH: Patty Huntington is the Australian correspondent for international trade bible Women’s Wear Daily and has her own fashion blog, frockwriter.blogspot.com. Huntington has also worked as a fashion journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald, its online arm smh.com.au and News Limited web portal news.com.au. Her freelance work has appeared across Channel 7’s Today Tonight program, The Australian and The Sun Herald.
Kate Vandermeer
KV: Kate Vandermeer has spent the last 15 years working across trend forecasting, design development and visual merchandising for fashion companies such as Mimco, Decjuba and French Connection. Vandermeer also writes for Marketing Magazine, Sunday Life, The Coolhunter and Fashionation and has just launched iSpyStyle, an information portal and consultancy business for the fashion industry.