Fashion Week and Social Media: 10 Ideas For Grabs.
If you are a PR or marketing strategist working with a fashion brand or design house, you must be under pressure these days to deliver the most innovative ideas incorporating social media into the busy fashion weeks season. Not just innovative, but something that can top last season’s front row laptops at D&G and the multi-cameras live streaming at McQueen. If you still don’t have that one big idea that will take your brand from Fashion 1.0 to 2.0, I have a few that could make just as much buzz, if executed well, even without a generous sponsorship from Apple. Feel free to adopt, as I most likely won’t find any use to them (my days at the creative agency are far behind), and most of them will be out of fashion next season. As much as some sound unrealistic, I would love to see them actually come to life, in some way.

Idea #1. Live stream the makeup room! Lots of designers live streamed their runway shows for their fans, but none live streamed behind the scenes of the craziness that goes into preparing the show. Anyone who has been backstage before the show knows that most interesting things happen there, when hundreds of people are working together to put on a 5 min show. A camera in the makeup room would get so much more views than any runway.
Idea #2. Let the models tweet! Again, if you’ve ever seen models backstage before the show, you must know that these creatures spend majority of their time texting or doing some other stuff on their phones. Why waste the opportunity on silly messages, when they can live tweet from the backstage of your show! Many models use Twitter these days, and encouraging them (or actually allowing them) to tweet anything they want can create lots of buzz on its own.
Idea #3. Make hashtag your fashion trend! I’m pretty sure 2010 will mark the year hashtags became trendy, just like accessories. These days it’s even appropriate to use them in official invites, right next to the dress code. So there is no reason you can’t create your own hashtag for the runway show or presentation and include it on the invite. That way guests will start tweeting about your brand right after receiving the invite, and connect with each other.
Idea #4: Open a countdown blog! Although we know designers keep their collections a secret before the shows, these days it’s all about the pre-show buzz. Give fans a tiny sneak peek of the fabric, the silhouette or a sketch - and you created excitement. Give them one every day for the 30 days before the show - and you created a real press frenzy! The cost of opening a blog is zero and you will actually save money and resources by not pitching the sneak peek to all bloggers, but publishing it yourself.




