We chatted with Liz Walker the Directer of Public Relations at Tibi. We love Tibi – for many reasons – but most of all because of how they have embraced the blogging community.
For the past two to three years, social media has been a huge focus for us. While we still use more traditional PR and Marketing techniques to get our news out, we like that the organic and rapid way of spreading our news through social media outlets helps us directly connect with the consumer. A great example – we’ll announce a contest or giveaway through Twitter or Facebook exclusively and we can create excitement and exclusivity by offering a chance to win to existing or new fans and followers only. More news related marketing, for example a recent collaboration we did for Spring 12 with Elin Kling and Julia Sarr-Jamois, is still often communicated through industry press outreach, and followed by social media, but even that is not always the case.
Our PR/Marketing team is three, plus a graphic designer who helps us to create visual content. We all brainstorm ideas for social media as a whole, and then handle posting on various outlets individually. This is a big initiative and definitely a group effort.
Amy’s an avid follower of 15 blogs or so but is always scouting around for the newcomers and I’d say in influenced a great deal by these guys. In the past year, we’ve worked with some great girls – Leandra Medine of The ManRepeller, live-styled our Spring 2011 collection in the windows of Bloomingdales in May. Elin Kling, Swedish blogger from Style by Kling, styled our Spring 2012 runway show and ad campaign starring Wonderland editor Julia Sarr-Jamois. Most recently, we sponsored the 2012 bloglovin’ Awards during Fashion Week. At our most recent show, we focused on this group over our celebrities because it’s so relevant – we had Hanneli, Glamourai, Olivia Palermo, Elin Kling, Song of Style, Tuula Vintage, Purseblog and more in our front row.
Of course from a PR perspective we love the coverage, but one of the best things about blogger attendance is the very different interpretations you get about the collection and the immediate feedback. Editors and buyers look at the pieces from Fall 12 with a September shoot or clothing delivery in mind-that’s over six months away! The bloggers post, tweet or tumble pics instantly in a lot of cases, and the various viewpoints could each represent the feeling of one of our customers. The show itself is so hectic, that we work on developing relationships in the months leading up to fashion week-inviting bloggers in to pull pieces to wear, or seeing them at events.
We use traditional web analytics to measure the traffic blogs and social media drives to our website and e-commerce. Outside of that, a less-measurable (but just as important) goal is awareness. Bloggers, depending on physical locale and focus, open our brand up to new customers with each post.
Of course social media is a huge change, I also think that the customer is expecting more and more-product info, brand news, peeks behind the scenes-and they want it all now. That immediacy is driven by the web, Twitter especially is a constant news feed. It’s a fun challenge to keep our fans and followers engaged. A few years ago we would plan for a feature to run in, let’s say, the July issue of a major magazine, now we want the feature on that magazine’s website tomorrow, or even announced on our own Twitter today.
Read the full article on Independent Fashion Bloggers.
Photo credit: Reed Young for Tibi, 2012
