As an industry that’s built entirely upon the exchange of opinions, the fashion world may seem like a field where social media would naturally take flight.  After all, aren’t terms like “word of mouth” and “viral buzz” the same keywords that signify success on both the catwalk and on Twitter?

But there’s a catch: the fashion world is actually built on a scarcity of opinions.  It relies on the reputations and influence of a select few tastemakers to tell the rest of the rabid audience what they’re supposed to like (and not like), and when.

So how did an industry that benefits from the existence of gatekeepers learn to embrace a new technology that essentially renders gatekeepers obsolete?

By turning their own world upside-down and offering everyone access.

In 2010, the vaunted New York Fashion Week — an event once so exclusive that access to it has been proffered as the grand prize on every season of Project Runway — went social in a big, big way.  Brands like American Express, Womens Wear Daily and Aveda helped sponsor a Twitterizing of Fashion Week, which spurred a wave of tech industry buzz.

Although the fashion world’s initial Twitter experiment was the source of much discussion, the model was reversed in 2011: instead of Twitter providing a top-down information hub, veteran (and aspiring) fashionistas seized the day and curated their own views of Fashion Week, resulting in a more vibrant variety of fashion coverage.  (Our clients Ouidad and Ecover even got into the mix!)

Today, the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week fan page on Facebook currently boasts more than 85,000 fans.  And while this year’s migration of fashion brands to Tumblr has had its share of ups and downs, the future implications of fashion’s affair with social media are clear: this once-insular industry is now actively seeking new ways to build buzz, generate awareness and connect with the general public.

As for fashion’s gatekeepers, they’re certainly not obsolete.  In fact, their expertise is actually even more valuable now, as a filter to help the public make sense of the flood of available fashion information that was once so highly restricted.

Who knew the industry that generates so much of the world’s art, imagery and gossip could get even bigger simply by opening their doors, pulling back their curtains and pressing the “share” button?

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Photo from 2010 Fashion Week by j-No, via Flickr.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the very first Ken doll, Mattel — the creators of Barbie, Ken and their vast plastic empire — launched a social media campaign to help Ken woo Barbie back.  If you didn’t know, the iconic couple broke up a few years back — presumably to see other plastic people — but Mattel decided today was the right time to reunite the star-crossed lovers.

The problem is, Mattel used social media to drive their Ken campaign.

Normally, this would be a good thing… if the campaign was producing content worth discussing, or if it were actually taking the public’s opinion seriously.

But, since a happy ending was most likely in the works all along, any pretense of “letting the public vote” on the ultimate outcome strikes us as a sham for at least three reasons:

1. Do you seriously think Mattel would spend millions of dollars just to announce that Barbie and Ken weren’t reuniting on Valentine’s Day — especially after they broke up on Valentine’s Day in 2004?
2. The web is alive with trolls, and the likelihood that those digital misanthropes would hijack the voting process to ensure that Barbie and Ken would remain apart is quite high.
3. Millions of people already saw Barbie and Ken come together on the big screen in Toy Story 3.  Creating an alternate, highly-commercialized “reunion” seems far less real — and less satisfying — than their Pixar rendezvous.

But maybe the largest problem of all with a social media campaign like this is…

Who cares?

Children and optimists will always vote for love.  Cold-hearted cynics will always vote against it.  And since cold-hearted cynics aren’t Barbie’s target audience, this entire campaign can be seen partly as “preaching to the choir” and partly as a public service reminder: “Hey, we’re still here.”

Ultimately, the entire campaign was really just a stunt meant to direct attention toward Ken’s 50th anniversary, in which the nearly 2 million Barbie fans on Facebook were used as leverage to catapult Ken into the mainstream news.  However, with Compete.com only registering 12,000 unique visitors to the barbieandken.com website in January, its traffic would need a sharp jump in February to match likely expectations.

Then again, today is the first day that Mattel will begin selling Barbie merchandise directly through Facebook, so it’s still possible (depending on sales) that the Ken campaign will eventually be seen as both a PR and a retail win for Mattel.

Which is nice.

But it isn’t social media.

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A lot of active fans.

When it comes to social media, a small-yet-active audience is often more valuable to a business than a large-yet-passive audience.

Why?

Because the incoming feedback, suggestions, color commentary and positive word of mouth that an active audience provides to a brand are useful indicators that they are passionate about (and loyal to) that brand.  And since you know they’re active, you can be sure that they’re out there… somewhere.

The trick is finding them.  (They’re active, so they move fast.)

One such example is the recent (and repeated) success of our client Bigelow Tea‘s Facebook sweepstakes.

These are giveaways that are awarded among fans of Bigelow Tea on Facebook and are promoted across Facebook, Twitter and email during the active duration of each particular sweepstakes offer — sometimes a week, sometimes a month, depending on the prize.

These sweepstakes have boosted Bigelow Tea’s Facebook page past the 10,000 fan mark, which is obviously great from a sheer numbers standpoint.  But it gets better.

It turns out that these newly-engaged fans have also stayed active on Bigelow Tea’s Facebook wall even after the sweepstakes have ended.  This has led to a more robust and interconnected community of tea drinkers than Bigelow had before their sweepstakes began, and it’s simultaneously providing the company with rich, colorful and valid feedback, which doubles as market research, inspiration for Bigelow Tea blog posts, and more.

All that for the price of a free gift of tea — and the opportunity to connect with a company that responds, listens, and provides a community where their fans can do the same.

Now that’s some impressive social media ROI.

To learn more, follow us on Twitter and Facebook!  (Or, hire us!)

Let’s say that, until now, you’ve had one small team (or even one single person) be responsible for your company’s entire social media presence.  And now that things are going well, you want to expand.  Maybe that means involving more people.  If so, consider this:

Your existing customers are used to what you’ve been doing.  If they wake up tomorrow and find themselves talking to someone completely new — and if they can tell — you risk a disconnect that might jeopardize your customers’ trust and emotional investment in your brand.

Here at Creative Concepts, we have a variety of writers, researchers, content creators and account managers juggling dozens of different tasks every day.  But no matter how many people are assisting our clients with their messaging, there’s one standard we must all adhere to:

We all have to be working from the same process, and toward the same goal.

That means we take steps to ensure that anyone who’s working on any aspect of a client’s communications is following the same rules, and staying apprised of the same topical developments, as everyone else.  This includes…

• Creating our own internal user manual for Twitter, with tips and suggestions for navigating various situations.
• Tracking industry-specific client-related news that might need to be addressed in the future.
• Assigning specific messaging tasks to the individuals best-suited for the nuances of each channel.
• Multiple layers of editing, so every message is reviewed by as many eyes as possible.
• Internal metric sharing, so each of us can analyze data and compare our individual conclusions.

etc.

Why do we do this?

Because it’s important that our clients be served by as many well-rounded service providers as possible.  But it’s equally important to us that our clients’ customers feel as though their Twitter, blog, Facebook, YouTube and other branded social media experiences are all built with the same building blocks, rather than feeling like disparate voices are being smashed together around a common topic.

Whether your social media messaging is being piloted by 2 people or 200, consistency is key.  No one trusts white noise.

How are you making sure the image of your brand is consistent in the minds of your customers?

Need some tips? You should follow us on Twitter and Facebook!

Image by mafleen.

Who’s looking at your website right now?

What are they looking for?

Why?

If you can’t tell, all your marketing is guesswork.

Social media usage may differ among age groups, but everyone from children to seniors has the ability to find and engage your brand online.  If your marketing or your social media messaging follows a one-size-fits-all approach, you may be ignoring (or alienating) various audience segments — and you can be sure that one of your competitors will find a way to engage the very users you’re overlooking.

But how do you know who’s finding you online?

One obvious way is to glance at your social media community.  Who’s following you on Twitter?  Who’s subscribing to your YouTube channel?  Who are your Facebook fans?  Users of social media channels are publicly volunteering the kind of information you’d normally have to pay a research group to track down for you.  In these cases, all you need is a little time and some demographic search tools.

Another way to learn who your customers really are?

Ask.

The web is full of general demographic surveys, but those are often broad snapshots of Internet or mobile usage as a whole.  And while traffic analysis tools like Google Analytics can tell you how many people are visiting your website, they still can’t tell you who those people really are.  (And if you’re in Germany, Google Analytics can get you in a whole different kind of trouble… but we digress.)

To better understand your audience and your customers, you need to ask them a little about themselves.  Online survey tools abound, or you can take the old-fashioned route and fire a few key questions at your email list.

Not everyone will respond to these requests, but the ones who do are the ones who are most likely to care about the quality of the information you’re providing to them.  They either want you to improve or they want you to succeed.  Either way, they’re providing you with extremely valuable information, so treat them well.

And then, once you have a better understanding of who you’re talking to online, you can craft better messages that deliver more relevant information to the people who need it most.

Image by c r i s.

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Welcome to the first work week of 2011!

Before you dive headfirst into your lengthy list of New Year’s resolutions, we here at Creative Concepts would like to offer a word of advice about setting goals for this (or any) new year:

Focus on results, not on numbers.

With 52 weeks ahead of you, it can be tempting to set goals for yourself that involve all kinds of numerical feats, like…

• Improving your web traffic
• Boosting your search results
• Increasing your inbound links, or your number of media mentions
• Doubling your number of Facebook friends or Twitter followers

… and so on.

And while each of these occurrences would be a boost to both your business and your brand’s reputation, they’re also merely the measurable by-product of a more important goal: doing your job well.

If you create compelling content, your traffic will increase.

If people are talking about you, your search results will improve and your media mentions will grow.

If you become vital in the lives of others, they’ll want to friend and follow you.

So yes, by all means, set big goals for 2011.  Aim for the stars.

Just make sure you’re judging your success in terms of quality, not quantity.

Image by Ross Websdale.

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As 2011 approaches, you already have some personal and business goals in mind that you’d like to work toward.  But what about your social media goals?  (You do have social media goals, right?)

First, identify the obvious problems that are hampering your social media efforts:

• Do you need to make social media easier?
• Do you need to find new ways to save time?
• Are you having trouble measuring the effects of social media?
• Do you need to convince someone that social media is worth it?

Maybe your goals are more specific, such as…

• Finding the right social media voice for your brand.
• Finding the right people to represent your brand online.
• Outsourcing or self-creating your social media work?
• Aligning your expectations with your customers’ expectations.

Or, maybe you’re trying to optimize a specific tool in your social media toolbox, like…

• Using Twitter to improve your customer service.
• Creating cool YouTube marketing videos to get people’s attention.
• Managing a useful LinkedIn group.

Be honest with yourself: if your social media efforts are falling short, admit it.

Then take the necessary steps to improve.

2011 is a whole new year.  Anything is possible.  So get cracking.

Need help? Come follow us on Twitter or Facebook!

Image by Finding Josephine.

As we’ve mentioned before, social media won’t save you from a PR crisis — and that’s okay.

For better or worse, the public has a short memory, and yesterday’s furious anger is tomorrow’s footnote.  This means companies large and small can survive bad PR as long as they can ride the occasional wave up and down.

For example, considering how much negative publicity was generated in the mainstream media when NPR fired Juan Williams, you might have thought NPR would be destined for funding crises and possible financial collapse.  Instead, as recent pledge drive numbers have shown, NPR’s donation numbers remained remarkably consistent despite all the media rhetoric.

So, if negative PR can’t sink a company… what can it do?

Ironically, bad PR’s biggest boon just might be providing useful feedback for the companies in question.

In the case of NPR, one of the lessons they learned was that the bulk of their angry commentary was coming from people who weren’t regular donors in the first place.  As Paul Farhi in The Washington Post reports:

Several station managers say the angriest responses have been from people who appeared not to be regular contributors, based on their cross-referencing caller and e-mailers’ names with databases of donors.

If that’s the case, NPR might downplay similar criticisms in the future since such commentary is most likely to come from far outside their core supportive audience.  Or, they could further investigate the issues at hand (freedom of speech, racial profiling, discriminatory practices) with the intention of appealing to that very same outsider audience.  Or, they might even fan the same flames that caused such an uproar in the first place, as a way to differentiate the actions of their brand from their competitors.

However NPR or any other company chooses to react to a sudden swirl of negative publicity, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: although social media may help messages spread faster than ever, its continual flood of information also helps good and bad PR disappear from the public’s memory faster than ever.

Want to learn more? Connect with us on Twitter or Facebook!

Image by Jared Dunn.

According to the 2010 US Census, your picture might need some tweaking.

As the census indicates, Hispanic and African-American audiences are the fastest-growing segments of the online population  In fact, based on these statistics, eMarketer predicts that more than 60% of the US’s Hispanic population will be online by 2012.  And that means the potential audience for every online brand is becoming more diverse by the day.

Since the dawn of the 2000s, social media has been trumpeted as “a conversation.”  And as that conversation becomes more diverse, more multicultural, more nuanced and more open to interpretation, it creates a whole new set of opportunities and challenges.

Take a look at the way you’re currently using your social media channels.  Now, ask yourself…

• How broad is your existing customer base?
• How diverse is your messaging?
• Are your products and services appealing to multiple demographics?
• Are you focusing (whether consciously or unconsciously) on too narrow of an audience segment?
• Are you equipped to address concerns and answer questions from potential customers who fall outside your expected demographic?

This isn’t just a question of ethnicity or cultural diversity.  This is a consideration of gender, age, region, income and education.  It’s also a welcome reminder that the Internet allows you to connect with everyone… if you’re prepared to do so.

Yes, the people you expect to be in your audience are probably there… but so are lots of other people you might not expect to be there, and might not be prepared to engage and support.  (Yet.)

So why not find ways to diversify your conversations now, before your competition does?

Image by D Sharon Pruitt.

Need some messaging tips? Connect with us on Twitter or Facebook!

Have you conducted a stress test of your marketing or PR team, to see how much trouble they can sustain before your reputation — or your business — would fall apart?  (Good news: it’s probably more than you think.)

On the other hand, how much positive feedback can you process before even the nicest compliments start sounding like white noise to your overtaxed brain?  (Do you even know what you should be listening for?)

As exciting as the immediate connectivity of social media can be, that immediacy comes with a price.  Bad news can travel fast, while good news can become a tsunami that overwhelms our ability to make use of it.  The key is to understand your limits at both ends, and to plan for both the best and the worst-case scenarios.  Ask yourself questions like…

• In an emergency, how many people would we need to operate our social media channels?
• Are there well-known protocols to help everyone stay on the same page?
• How bad does a situation need to get before we need to make a public statement?

Or, while thinking happy thoughts…

• How are we separating “good” feedback from “great” feedback?
• How much of our feedback is actionable, and how much doesn’t require a response?
• Can we identify potential partnerships and opportunities by studying our metrics?

The better prepared you are for both the highs and lows of real-time engagement with customers, competitors and the general public, the easier it is to capitalize on your upsides and mitigate your losses.

Want to hear more? Connect with us on Twitter or Facebook!