This weekend Andrea and I will be flying out to Southern California for the first ever Style Week OC! I can’t tell you how excited I am about this! First of all - it’s a weekend full of fun events, cute clothes, and CA weather (70-80 degrees of perfection!). Second of all - it involves my new love, social media.
That’s right, this trip isn’t just for fun, although I’m sure we’ll have plenty. We’re going out there to Twitter live from the events and keep our followers updated on all the exciting details. We’ll also be updating the Style Week OC Myspace page with pictures and comments.
Leading up to this weekend we’ve been Twittering away, giving our followers fashion advice, links to cool fashion blogs, and updates on events that are already happening this week. During this time I’ve actually connected personally with two of my followers and plan to meet them this weekend (DISCLAIMER: I do not think you should meet someone in person that you have met online unless you have a buddy with you and are in a public, safe place in the day time.) I know that two sounds like a small number but considering that without social media it’s unlikely we’d have ever connected or that they’d have ever heard of this event, it’s actually pretty cool. One of my followers even let me know she was going to an event this week that she’d heard about from me.
The more this goes on the more convinced I am that social is the way to move forward. People are tired of traditional advertising yelling at them, they want to connect with the brands and things they care about in a way that’s meaningful for them. At the same time I’ve learned so much about the most effective (and maybe not so effective) ways to use social. Some things I’ll be sure to keep in mind for next time are:
1. Make sure to put the community first. At first we were thinking about what messages we wanted to tell people. But then we started thinking about what things people would be interested in hearing and I think that’s when the relationships started to form between us and some of our followers.
2. Be new and interesting. This time around we had a static page with a list of events that we were linking to. Next time I think it would be fun to have a blog that we could update with new content, news, pictures, video, etc and then use Twitter as a way to alert people to this new content. People like to get new information but they get tired when you send them the same thing more than once.
3. Be personal. We started out with some generic messages but as we went and were posting more and more our own voices started to get into the tweets. I think this made us a more real part of the community. It wasn’t “StyleWeekOC” saying something, it was me, an actual person involved with StyleWeekOC, talking to my online friends.
All in all I think this has been a great success and the next time will only get better as we figure out the best ways to get involved in social communities. But I’m going to worry about that next week. This weekend I’m just going to be myself, and have fun in the OC - keeping my friends and followers updated on my adventures.
In case you want to be one of my friends and/or followers, you can find me here:
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=361621429
http://twitter.com/StyleWeek_OC
