Digital snippets: Dior, YSL, Ralph Lauren, Zara, Lyst

Some more great stories from around the web surrounding all things fashion and digital over the past week:

 

• Backstage Dior video shows one million flowers being installed at couture show (as above) [Fashionista]

• YSL launches eyeshadow palette inspired by Facebook [Kiss and Makeup]

• Ralph Lauren organises Facebook send-off for Olympic athletes [Mashable]

• Zara to open Chinese internet store in September 2012 [China Retail News]

• Social commerce platform Lyst secures $5m funding [TheNextWeb]

• KCD and Spring form partnership for global fashion communications, will help brands navigate complex new media landscape [WWD]

• Designer uses Photoshop and textile software program to knit medical images into high fashion [The Atlantic]

Social media proves the new press release for DKNY in faux #UK2012 video

You’re opening a new store in London. What do you do… A) send out a press release, B) announce it via social media, or C) make a video that explains the fact there’s no need for A anymore by demonstrating it happening via B in a faux scenario, and by proxy achieving it via B in real life in anycase.

Still with me?

Check out this new video from DKNY (starring “socialmedialites” including @psimadethis, @cocorocha, @bagsnob and more) that plays on each of the above themes to promote the opening of the brand’s new Bond Street store in London this weekend. Fake hashtag: #UK20112, but given the fact we’re now all talking about it that’d be a real hashtag too.

As put by DKNY PR Girl herself: “#Socialmedia really is the new press release!”

 

 

Urban Outfitters and the power of Twitter tribes

I’ve been seeing tweets, news articles and comment about the necklace Urban Outfitters reportedly ripped off (as pictured above) from a Chicago-based designer called Stevie, for several days. What I hadn’t realised was that the story had originally gone viral off the back of one tweet.

Amber Karnes, a fellow crafty, wrote on Thursday: “I think it’s time to boycott Urban Outfitters. They have done this to so many independent artists. NOT OK http://bit.ly/kvbMdt“

Despite the fact Karnes had little more than 1,000 followers at the time, that post travelled around the world within a matter of hours. The Huffington Post picked it up, so did Miley Cyrus. UO pulled the item from its website and its stores.

If anyone needed confirmation of the power of Twitter, it doesn’t get much better than this. The whole thing is comprehensively reported in Karnes’ post-tweet analysis.

What I love particularly, is her reference to tribes:

In his book Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, Seth Godin explains that you only need 1,000 true fans to make a living. That the secret of success is no longer in mass appeal, but in niche. In the tight knit group of a network. Today’s Twitter craziness was all about that.

I am not a Twitter celebrity by any means. I barely had over 1,000 followers when the day began and I’m pretty sure about 200 of those are spam-bots. What I do have – and the reason that my call for a boycott on Urban Outfitters spread so fast and wide – is a tribe. A tight knit group of independent artists and crafters that follow me. My cause resounded with them. They spread it, and their friends spread it, and a few big influencers on Twitter spread it, and then it was gone.

When I worked as the webmaster (and often-shouted-down social media champion) at Fortune 500 railroad Norfolk Southern, I had a hard time explaining this concept. Their PR heads would say, “Why should a big corporation worry about cultivating a relationship with some railfan who only has 600 followers? Shouldn’t we go after the big ones? These little nobodies can’t do us any damage.” Well, today proved the opposite. Urban Outfitters is trending not because they have a great new line coming out, but because of a PR nightmare. Because one “nobody” put up a tweet about a crafter that had been wronged. And her tight little tribe of crafters responded.

Touché.