Coup de couture: bloggers vs. traditional media in fashion

Bloggers are taking over the front row at Fashion Week in London, The Times wrote on Tuesday. This phenomenon has been rising over the past few years, and is recently getting a lot of attention. Leading character in this discussion is Tavi Gevinson, a 13 (!) year old blogger who, using a simple Blogspot account just like most students in our course, made her way front row and towards fame, writing about fashion and the role it plays in her life. She and collegue Bryanboy, whom Marc Jacobs named a bag after back in 2008, have even been added to the CFDA (Council of Fashion Designers of America). One might wonder whether they even have time to go to school anymore. 

Left: Teenage blogger extraordinaire Tavi
Right: Marc Jacobs' Bryanboy bag (photo By George Chinsee)

Meanwhile, online shopping website Racked National playfully took up the buzz and sent a five-year old girl to the New York Fashion Week to report about it. While this stunt received many indignant comments, Racked-editor Danica Lo explained it as "a tongue-in-chic (forgive the bad pun!) answer to the child-blogging-gone-wild movement happening in fashion right now", and made sure the child did not get her own seat, but sat on her lap instead.

Cécile Narinx, editor-in-chief of the Dutch fashion magazine ELLE, discussed this issue last month in De Wereld Draait Door. [in Dutch, 8:30]



What I find particularly interesting about this discussion, is the way it explores the boundaries between regular, traditional media and a more democratic, 'anyone can write' guerilla style way of publishing online. As long as each of them provide their own, unique qualities well, I think it's perfectly possible of them to co-exist.

To be or not to be... social?

Although social media are the talk of the town in business communication, only one out of five companies world wide has a formal policy concerning them. This is what I read today in an article on managersonline.nl. The data were the outcome of an international study conducted by Manpower.

Negative aspects of social media mentioned in the article included a loss of productivity by employees who use social media for personal purposes and potential information leakage. However, they do also have benefits: building up relationships with customers, cooperation between different division and possibilities for innovation, to mention a few. Research conducted by Weber Shandwick showed that 73% of the companies which are listed in the Fortune 100 had a Twitter account, but that only a quarter of them tweets regularly. The original source, express.be explains that 52% of them barely show any activity, according to their numbers of links, references and reactions. Half of the companies involved have less than 500 followers.

Policy or no policy, I think social media should not be ignored. Of course, it can be a deliberate choice not to use Twitter et al, but in my opinion every modern company should at least take the power of social media into consideration. And it's better to be prepared than to be taken by storm. In the case of the article, I think it is clear that the benefits definitely outweigh the downsides, especially when a good policy is drawn up and lived up to by employees. This also includes the regularity of updating and monitoring, because a neglected profile is probably even worse than not having one at all. Social media offer companies such a large number of strategic possibilities (which I will write about on this blog), it would be a shame to let that go to waste.