By now, even the stodgiest companies have found their way onto Twitter. They have discovered it isn’t just another marketing channel with a funny name, it’s more like a conversation they need to join or risk losing influence over how consumers view them or their brands.

The service, which lets users send 140-character texts, or “tweets,” to people who have signed up to follow them, has proved to be an effective way to reach younger consumers and to help build a brand.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Amateur photographers use the free iPhone app to filter camera-phone pictures and make them look as if they’ve been processed using old-fashioned darkroom techniques. Fashion enthusiasts—an image-obsessed group—are enamored with how Instagram turns a low-quality image into a moody composition. At the tents in New York this week, editors, bloggers and publicity people are donning Instagram’s digital rose-colored glasses and uploading images by the thousands, to the chagrin of some professional photographers.

There are Instagram images of runway shots, backstage peeks, and plenty of more mundane objects. Oscar de la Renta’s Instagram account posted a photo of a pin cushion. Leandra Medine, who runs the fashion blog The Man Repeller, has been snapping her own outfits and accessories. “I Instagram everything from newborn babies to pizza pies to new Alexander Wang shoes,” Ms. Medine says. “My life is significantly more attractive in X-Pro.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

For Fashion Week, which kicks off Thursday at Lincoln Center, Tumblr is bringing in two dozen of the top fashion bloggers who use its site, putting them up in a hotel and sending them to myriad events, including backstage tours and a rooftop party. The plan is part of a push to raise its own profile and the profiles of its bloggers.

It’s also evidence of its sway. Tumblr’s acceptance by big-name designers is the latest sign of an increasingly cozy relationship between two strange bedfellows: the fashion and technology communities.
Luxury labels, which once shied away from e-commerce for fear of muddying their brands, are now embracing blogging and social-media tools such as Tumblr and Twitter because they provide a direct way to reach fashion-conscious consumers. The invited “Tumblrs,” as the bloggers are called, all have thousands of followers.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Erika Bearman is OscarPRGirl, Oscar de la Renta’s director of communications and the woman behind the august designer’s lively Twitter feed.

From when she wakes in the morning, Ms. Bearman, 29 years old, is on the short-form social networking service, giving her digital acolytes a breezy blend of personal musings and insider detail about the label: “fact: Oscar de la Renta’s first show had six models. They did their own makeup, and brought their own shoes,” she tweeted last Sunday.

Ms. Bearman is one of several executives who tweet on behalf of luxury fashion brands, masking their marketing in a Carrie-Bradshaw-esque life-stream. Dozens of labels now have a presence on Twitter, the benefits of which are seen most clearly during New York Fashion Week. Tweets come fast and furious during the shows, providing designers with instantaneous feedback from attendees and giving the events a much bigger marketing stage, albeit a virtual one.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Comedian Andy Dick complained that the outage kept him from blocking a user who had taken a swipe at his celebrity status. Mr. Dick says he usually blocks someone about once a week for writing rude comments, calling himself “an easy target” and the offenders “haters.”

When Twitter wouldn’t let him obstruct a particular insulter Thursday, Mr. Dick persisted. “I tried it about 10 times in a row,” he said, to no avail.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

A new microblogging site targeting moms and modeled after Twitter launched Friday. Rachael Herrscher, a 31-year-old mother of three, has added the abbreviated commenting feature to her site Today’s Mama.

Ms. Herrscher is not the first to rip off the idea of Twitter. The more popular the site becomes–it is adding millions of users by the month–the more knockoffs pop up. There are Twitter clones for different countries and a handful by subject or topic.

Dubbed “Connect” on Today’s Mama, Ms. Herrscher’s version has several Twitter traits. Posts are constrained to 140 characters or less, comments directed at someone begin with the “@” symbol and topics are marked by the “#” symbol.

Unlike Twitter, however, Today’s Mama has a group function. Ms. Herrscher has created groups by region, such as Bay Area Mamas, and topics, such as parents of teens or the book “Twilight.” After a user joins a group, she can send a message to it by adding an exclamation point and the group name.

Read the rest of this post

David Liu, CEO of the wedding Web site, said the idea is to provide the “ingredients” that people planning weddings seek out. Brides are best served by content available in their specific location, he said. Likewise, wedding vendors want to advertise in bridal outlets that target a region.

The new sites, which range from the Ozarks to Oahu, Orange County to Orlando, are catalogued under weddings.com. The local sites bring the total number of niche Web sites under the Knot umbrella to 85. Mr. Liu says the company plans to have more than 200 such sites by the end of the year.

Hyperlocal content is increasingly popular with media outlets, especially among news organizations. The New York Times (NYT) recently launched a pair of sites called “The Local” to cover communities in Brooklyn and New Jersey. Patch, a startup Web company backed by new AOL (TWX) CEO Tim Armstrong, covers community news in a handful of neighborhoods in New Jersey. Topix aggregates content by zip code.

Read the rest of this post

On Monday, the video-streaming site added Johannes Larcher to its executive ranks as senior vice president of international. Mr. Larcher must work with each content provider to negotiate international rights for each video. Hulu has more than 130 content providers and 1,100 TV programs and movies, and its library continues to grow.

Certain snippets of content are already available outside the U.S. Tuesday evening’s news conference with President Barack Obama, for example, will be streamed internationally.

Hulu is a partnership between General Electric’s (GE) NBC Universal and News Corp. (NWS), owner of Dow Jones, which publishes The Wall Street Journal.

In international activities, Hulu trails behind Joost, an independent start-up competing in the premium online content space. Joost has a localized site for the U.K. and is viewable around the world, though content availability varies from country to country.

Read the rest of this post

Sponsored tweets are becoming more popular. Brands are recruiting well-known Twitterers to spread the word about a specific product or service. For example, Marcelo Tas, a Brazilian television personality, signed a deal with Telefonica (TAR) to help pitch its new Internet and phone service.

But marketers aren’t just looking for celebrities with hundreds of thousands of followers. They are also going after Web personalities with a more targeted following.

Enter Melanie Notkin, the 40-year-old New York entrepreneur behind the site SavvyAuntie.com. She has built a community of what she calls PANKs (Professional Aunt, No Kids). She offers advice on things like gifts an aunt could buy her niece or nephew.

Read the rest of this post

Hulu has expanded its content library considerably since its launch a year ago. The Internet video site has grown from 50 content partners to more than 130 and has nearly 40,000 pieces of video.

Now, in addition to the full-length TV shows that made the site popular, it has an expansive, somewhat chaotic library. The site contains everything from two-hour feature films such as Universal’s “Liar, Liar,” starring Jim Carrey, to short instructional Web videos such as “How to Make Stuffed Crust Pizza.”

Andy Forssell, Hulu’s senior vice president of content and distribution, says the goal is to provide users and advertisers with more options. Hulu is a joint venture of General Electric’s (GE) NBC Universal and News Corp., (NWS) which owns Wall Street Journal (and AllThingsD.com) publisher Dow Jones.

Among the newest content partners is Condé Nast Publications Inc., the people behind magazines like Vogue and Wired. Videos from the company’s online destinations, such as Epicurious.com, a site for food aficionados, are now appearing on Hulu. They’ve added content from four sites: Epicurious, Wired.com, Style.com and Men.Style.com.

Read the rest of this post

Nearly 3.6 million people age 65 and older visited career-development Web sites in January, according to a Nielsen Online report released Thursday.

The majority of job site visitors–18.7 million–are still between the ages of 35 and 49. But people 65 and older were the fastest growing group by far, up 41 percent from the same time a year prior.

Chuck Schilling, research director at Nielsen Online, says the figures represent a “desire to stay employed longer” in order to “sock away more retirement savings.”

Read the rest of this post