Week 6 Reaction

The article Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship made a lot of good points about social network sites. One being that these social network sites are not based on latent ties but rather to connect with the people we are already connected with. However, after ready through the article one thing really stood out to me and interested me…and that was how different sites become popular among different demographics of people and different countries.

Reading through the article, it kept listing different social networking sites, and who they are popular among. Friendster became popular of Burning Man attendees, bloggers, and gay men. Orkut became extremely popular in Brazil. Mixi in Japan, LunarStorm in Sweden, and many many more.

This just got me really interested, because I was thinking how and why certain groups are drawn to certain sites. I would have understood it more if the social network site was created in the country and for those people, but Orkut wasn’t created in Brazil, it just became popular there. And my question is why?

I would love someone to do research on the reasonings behind why certain groups of people gravitate towards certain social network sites, even ones that aren’t designed to be for a specific social group. It would be really interesting if someone did research to tell us what certain aspects of a certain social network sites draw Brazilians, homosexuals, or corporate.

Its all about the Tweets…I mean the fashion.

Using my new social media bookmarking site Digg (Tune in Oct. 6 for Jessica’s and my presentation on it!) I came across an article about London Fashion Week and social media. Before I read the article it was hard to picture the extremely wealthy, somewhat snobby (no offense) designers and participants of London Fashion Week using social media to engage the lowly fans…but I was wrong and Burberry proved that to me.

The high fashion line of Burberry thought totally outside of the box and decided to show their new 2012 collection by tweeting it! Before each look walked out onto the runway at London Fashion Week, Burberry took a picture of each look and uploaded it on Twitter. I thought this was an extremely genius idea for multiple reasons.

First off, the people who aren’t able to attend London Fashion Week saw the Burberry collection BEFORE all the high profile people who paid a lot of money to be there. That helped engage the fans and brought a huge buzz around the new line. Whether it was the best or worst line of the show, it was the line that definitely got the most attention.

Second, by tweeting every look, it became a trending topic on twitter and got huge exposure. People who didn’t even know it was London Fashion Week or would rather shop at Walmart than high end stores, knew the Burberry was doing something completely different and unusual.

Burberry found a way to use social media to actually interact with its fans and gain a larger scope of fans. Got to give them cudos for their creativity…in the design and in the social media.