PICK-A-'P' for PEOPLE POWER -PROLIFIGATING

Net gain

Patty Huntington | April 06, 2009

The Australian
TALK of the town has Alessandra Facchinetti (ex Valentino) already working on Tom Ford's nascent women's line. So reported The New York Times' T Magazine from Milan Fashion Week on February 28, floating the juiciest rumour of the autumn-winter show season. The news was not, however, broken by the print edition, nor even by the style magazine's blog, The Moment. Instead, a BlackBerry alert posted to The Moment's Twitter account informed 100,000 followers in a single "tweet".


Illustration: Zeus Bascon for illustrationroom.com.au

Within seconds, the information was re-routed across cyberspace by The Moment’s fans to their own individual Twitter flocks and to an international constellation of “member community websites”, which consist of over 130 million blog readers and over 350 social networking sites.

According to last month’s Nielsen Online’s Global Faces and Networked Places report, two thirds of the global internet population view and/or participate in social media networks, accounting for one in every 11 minutes spent online. And that allocation of time is growing at more than three times the rate of overall internet use. Given Internet World Stats’ estimate of the global internet population – 1.5 billion – we’re talking about a social media audience of a billion people.

Nielsen Online says 7.5 million Australians visited consumer-generated media websites in January 2009, up 17 per cent on 2008. Users averaged 13 sessions a month and 13 minutes a session. That compares with 8.3 million visitors to the news/information category of mainstream media that month. Of those 7.5 million users, more than 5 million – one quarter of Australia’s population – visited Facebook (up 100 per cent on 2008), 2.4 million MySpace (-17 per cent) and 2.3 million blogger blogs (+21 per cent). And 150,000 of them used Twitter – which did not even register on Nielsen Online’s radar last year.

The intel on Tom Ford’s women’s line was leaked by one of Ford’s luxury industry intimates. And although 72 hours later there was still no confirmation – or denial – from the designer’s camp, The Moment had managed to engage its customers as brand ambassadors who traded the information, created buzz and generally inspired confidence in The New York Times as a go-to destination for fashion news. The Moment had attempted live coverage in previous seasons, publishing mini-field dispatches under the tag “The Fashion Telex”, but Twitter has turned that Fashion Telex into a real-time reality.

Launched in 2006, the free micro-blogging service with which people can communicate in 140-character alerts is rapidly becoming a social media revolution, with 900 per cent growth in the past 12 months – fuelled by a media profile out of all proportion to its actual size. Twitter’s 6 million users are dwarfed by the 175 million users of the five-year-old Facebook – which grew 127 per cent in 2008 to become the world’s most popular social network, with double the traffic of MySpace in December, according to the internet marketing research company comScore.

But Twitter is the media darling du jour; it grew by 1382 per cent in the 12 months to February this year. Harnessed by Barack Obama in the first Web 2.0 US presidential campaign and by celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore to declare war on the tabloids and to communicate directly with their fans, Twitter has also turned citizen journalists into newsbreakers. Examples include eyewitness dispatches from the Mumbai terrorist attacks and the Hudson River plane crash.

The Moment began the past autumn-winter show season with 3000 Twitter followers. In three weeks that number grew to 121,000, facilitated by the integration of a Twitter module on The Moment’s main style page. As of mid-March, The Moment was the only fashion news site in Twitterholic.com’s Top 100 rankings (it ranked 53rd; the main New York Times Twitter feed placed sixth). “The growth was exponential and it surprised me,” says Sydney expatriate Horacio Silva, features and online director of T Magazine. “I thought Facebook would be the one to take off.”

“Every time I turned around, there was The Cut (New York magazine’s blog), Marie Claire, Grazia, Allure, Elle,” he says of New York Fashion Week’s backstage Twitterati. “I don’t know why this was the watershed. It happened in the same way designers tend to uniformly agree on a trend that’s floating in the ether. Also, reading a post three days after a show doesn’t quite cut it. (Readers) want minute-by-minute, blow-by- blow accounts.”

Yet if the explosion of social media and its combining with traditional media can generate “mind-blowing numbers” – as the news site Mashable said about the CNN-Facebook Live Inauguration 2009 coverage (136 million page views and 21.3 million live video streams) – why are so many marketers allergic to the medium?

Nielsen’s Advertising Information Services estimates Australia’s mainstream offline media advertising spend – including television, print and magazines but excluding pay-TV, suburban newspapers and classifieds – to be between $9.5 billion and $10 billion this year, up from $9.4 billion in 2008. PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Interactive Advertising Bureau reports that Australian online advertising spending for 2008 reached $1.7 billion, up 27 per cent on 2007, and will top $2 billion this year.

Bureau chief executive Paul Fisher predicts that Australia’s online ad spend could reach $3 billion within four years. That would rival newspapers and television – or possibly overtake them, as is forecast in Britain this year. Until then, social networks will continue striking the fear of god into many marketers.

This is very curious, given the difficulties faced by the traditional media: nose-diving profits; a global advertising economy expected to shrink by 10–15 per cent in 2009; and a game-changing shift in consumer behaviour, one that emphasises word-of-mouth over traditional marketing. “The viral nature of these new social media has produced a marketing network the likes of which no marketer has experienced or been able to tap into,” Fisher says. “And one group of marketers see this as an opportunity, while others see it as a threat.”

Stuart Pike, Asia Pacific director of industry solutions at Nielsen Online, says new media is underappreciated, underutilised and poorly understood. “It’s the white whale of our industry. It’s out there somewhere. When somebody wakes up to the potential of that space and gets the value proposition right for marketers, they’re going to make a lot of money.”

On the advice of their PR experts, many traditional “top-down” marketers are also very cautious about embracing the “bottom-up” new-media specialists who are already engaged in conversations with their audiences: bloggers. And this seems particularly true of the fashion establishment. “(They are) the red-headed bastard step-children of fashion – third-class citizens,” says Silva, who moved to New York in 1998 to co-found the Chic Happens gossip column at independent fashion site Hintmag.com.

The four-year-old Australian fashion blog Sassybella boasts audited traffic of 45,000 unique visitors a month, equivalent to the 47,691 audited print circulation of Harper’s Bazaar. Sassybella founder-editor Helen Lee has also filed to the more popular British blog CatwalkQueen.tv, which attracts 250,000 unique visitors a month.

Yet Lee’s offer of a total monthly audience approaching 300,000 unique visitors for her coverage of last April’s Australian Fashion Week failed to cut any mustard with fashion publicists. Lee claims the majority of them ignored her.

“Magazines have been around for decades, newspapers have been around for decades – the internet is new,” publicist Adam Worling says. Although he regularly deals with the online arms of mainstream publishers, Worling has yet to liaise with a single independent blogger – including Lee, who has never approached him. “None has provided any information. That’s going to be something new for the internet and for blogging sites – to get out there and to sell themselves. People go with brands they know.”

That said, being associated with established media brands and some of the highest online news traffic in Australia did not impress the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture enough to help me gain Paris show accreditations in 2007. (At that time, Nielsen NetView put the unique visitors to smh.com.au and news.com.au at 1,482,608 and 1,258,721, respectively.) Despite having dealt with both Fairfax and News Ltd for decades and being accorded accreditation for two 2006 seasons as the fashion reporter of The Sydney Morning Herald, the Paris organisers refused my request because I was filing exclusively to the Herald's website, not its print edition. It happened again six months later, after I had joined News Ltd’s online portal. Several big brands, notably Prada, also stopped providing tickets after I moved online.

In 2009, more and more companies are taking baby steps into the social media wilderness – and several companies are making extravagant claims about who got to the edge of it first. In February, Roberto Cavalli claimed that he had 11 million Facebook fans. His official Facebook page in fact boasted only 75,339 fans as of mid-March. Gucci claims to be the luxury company with the most Facebook fans (372,404), yet Burberry’s “official” Facebook page boasts more (593,707). Burberry confirms that this is not their official page, but a fan page. Social media gurus might ask: What’s the difference?

In December, Britain’s Agent Provocateur claimed to have been the first luxury company to launch a multi-platform social media campaign. Yet Italy’s Costume National was very socially active early last year, with a portfolio including Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, three corporate blogs and 44 employees on Twitter.

At the end of 2008 former Forrester Research social media analyst Peter Kim launched a social media marketing wiki. Of the 500 brands listed, fashion, apparel, retail and beauty account for only a tiny percentage.

Some examples include Zappos, Nike, Victoria’s Secret and American Apparel’s recent advertising campaign modelled by Chictopia bloggers. The wiki does not include Dolce e Gabbana’s Swide website (or the brand’s pioneering use of live-streaming runway videos), Viktor & Rolf’s virtual live-stream runway video, Burberry’s Facebook-MySpace-Bebo-YouTube tie-in with its The Beat For Men fragrance, or recent DKNY and Lane Crawford ad campaigns (shot by The Sartorialist’s Scott Schuman and Jak & Jil’s Tommy Ton, respectively).

Nor does it include Bryanboy and Marc Jacobs. After making a YouTube video tribute to Marc Jacobs in late 2007, the Manila-based fashion blogger Bryanboy scored a Marc Jacobs handbag named in his honour – and a deluge of worldwide publicity. Marc Jacobs Japan recently asked Bryanboy to narrate a behind-the-scenes documentary on the 2009–10 autumn-winter shows. The internet research and analysis service eMarketer expects ad spending on social networks to grow 10.2 per cent in 2009, to $US1.3 billion. How much of this is driven by recessionary budget cuts, with marketers being forced to look at cost-effective social media in a new light?

“It’s actually been a long time coming,” says US social media commentator David Armano, the Chicago-based vice-president of Experience Design at Canadian interactive marketing agency Critical Mass. “(Online ad revenue) definitely started accelerating about two years ago but I would say that the (economy has) probably tipped it even more in that direction – now people are really looking at their dollars.”

Critical Mass also works for Gucci and D&G and has advertised for a full-time social media director for another client, Adidas. In February, the agency assisted on an Adidas social media campaign for the National Basketball Association’s all-star weekend. Based on Orlando Magic centre Dwight Howard, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter content was posted to a microsite, which also showcased an anchor television ad. “This is a very different type of marketing. Not a lot of people are doing it, it’s pretty new,” Armano says, adding that the biggest challenge faced by marketers is losing control. Marketers, he suggests, are nervous of taking a leap of faith into the hands of those who could prove to be their ultimate brand ambassadors – their highly engaged customers. He calls them “citizen marketers”.

“Word of mouth is more important to brands than ever,” Armano continues. “The old school of branding was about creating stories and a myth around the brand. Word of mouth is not compatible with myth. It’s the opposite. Things don’t get talked about unless there’s something worth talking about. It’s not just about marketing and it’s not just about products. It’s about keeping (customers) interested in your brand. Having them become your advocates, your marketers. Because that’s the best advertising you can have.”

Patty Huntington’s fashion blog can be found at http://frockwriter.com.

This story originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of Wish magazine. Wish is inserted free inside The Australian on the first Friday of every month.