Online PR blogs by LEON Bailey Green

The Beth Ditto collection was as I expected. There is nothing shy or retiring about this plus size extravaganza.

Some expect the larger women to hide under black smocks and grey scale, and whilst there’s certainly black in the Ditto range – it comes in cropped biker jackets, sequins, and bold prints.

Though Evans has previously been a footnote on the high street fashion favourites, this collection is going to fly off the shelves, and the size eights and ten’s will just wear it baggy.

A new website www.bethdittoatevans.co.uk has been specifically created to drive traffic to the collection.

Her face is place-able and unmistakable – she smoulders from the latest Burberry ad campaign and appears with the modelling elite in party pages.

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley in Agent Provocateur video

Online she certainly holds her corner. There are hundreds of images littering the web, mostly from shoots but also with boyfriend Tyrone Wood (son of Ronnie Wood, who she’s been dating since 2003), looking very girl-about-town.

The images are divided into two leagues: English rose or smouldering temptress, images which are largely supplied by her Agent Provocateur work.

Along with the de rigueur models homepage with archives of images, news updates and envious measurements, she also has her very own fan site set up by a respectable obsessive with over 2,500 hits to date.

Rosie also has a MySpace page set up by another fan, who refuses anything negative to be said about the beloved model.

Last week I chaired the London Fashion Network’s Trading Online event, which focused on Getting Noticed.

L to R: Richard, Barnaby, myself, Joel, Stephen

The panel included Stephen Pratley from Shine Marketing, Richard Thorpe from Screen Pages, Joel Vertes from Olswang and Barnaby Brown from motelrocks.com.

Topics covered included search engine optimisation, paid search, fashion blogs, domain names and email marketing.

I stumbled across Lookbook.nu after searching for hours on the Internet – trying to find out if I could order 24/7 Suits online.

If you haven’t heard of 24/7 Suits it’s an Italian label created by Livio Graziottin: a menswear collection, which unfortunately seems to be sold everywhere but the UK.

See the collection on the 24/7 Suits website

I found 24/7 Suits on lookbook.nu and quickly became distracted.

Gemma Cartwright, founder of Catwalk Queen, is one of Britain’s most popular fasion bloggers. I asked Gemma about Catwalk Queen’s editorial process, the influence of fashion blogs and what items, available online, she’s coveting.

Who is the Catwalk Queen reader?
She’s a young woman interested in fashion, shopping and celebrities who wants mainstream fashion news in an easily accessible way.

She shops on the high street but aspires to buy designer, and she probably loves a bit of quirky vintage too.

How do you decide day to day which stories to cover?
We have a calendar of big events; award shows, fashion weeks, big movie premieres, album releases and so on, and tailor content to fit that.

We also look at seasonal trends, so we’ll cover swimwear in the run-up to Summer, coats in Autumn etc. But a lot of it comes from what happens on a daily basis. What we see on the news wires, picture agencies and our RSS feeds each day.

I’d say about 60% of the content is unplanned, and is a reaction to what’s happening at the time.

What’s your take on email press releases sent to multiple editors using the BCC field?
Not a problem at all, so long as it’s well-targeted. I understand that no PR has the time to personalise every single email.

But you’d be amazed at the amount of useless press releases I get because people haven’t read the site before adding me to their mailing list.

Also, if they forget to blind copy, that’s another matter!

If you haven’t met Vicki Snow, founder of Snow PR, then say hello to one of the most ambitious women in fashion PR!

Me with Vicki Snow at Vapiano in Soho

Vicki and I recently met up at Vapiano in Soho near Snow PR’s office.

I worked with Nikki Beukes, fashion content editor at Shudoo, on an editorial feature with some of the UK’s most popular fashion bloggers.

We asked them for their favourite shoe of the past year, which celeb has the best shoe collection and their must read fashion blog.

Mischief PR worked its magic for an excellent online campaign for feelunique.com.

The online beauty store got talked about after offering to pay people 10p per wink for displaying feelunique.com on their eyelid.

News of the offer (which has now closed) even spread to The Huffington Post, which was last year named as one of the most powerful blogs by The Guardian.

Online PR firm onlinefire hosted The Voscars (Virgin Mobile Oscars) to find the best viral campaign.

Bloggers, social media commentators and journalists were asked for their favourite viral campaign and my submission was this Jeans Jumping video which came 17th.

You’re not a full member of celebdom until you’ve had a dedicated thread that spans at least three pages on the Digital Spy forums.

The boards are awash with scathing, mindless and often hate fuelled comments that would leave celebrities, with the thickest of skins, incandescent with rage.

I did have a bit of a chuckle (albeit little) at a comment made by Rob22 in response to a post by Imogen M…

Imogen M said…

“I detest Cheryl Cole. You can’t polish a turd. This “nation’s sweetheart” nonsense is an absolute joke and she’s becoming hideously over-exposed. She has no personality and only got as famous as she is now because her footballer bloke cheated on her.”

To which Rob22 replied…

Read my article ‘Simon Cowell to choose new X Factor judge via social media?’ on E-Consultancy.

A couple of weeks ago at the launch night for RAW at London nightclub Jalouse (in support of Cancer Research UK), I saw an example of an established profession using the internet to generate revenue.

On arrival at the private members club, frequented by celebs including Sienna Miller, Ronan Keating and Leonardo DiCaprio, attendees were photographed red carpet style by Pictures Inc, and given the option to purchase the print outs on site; just like when you get off the Log Flume at Alton Towers.

But if you didn’t want to run the risk of losing your print out on the way home, you could always log on to the Pictures Inc website the next morning and purchase the photo online as an A4 print out or get it made into a key ring.

The internet means photographers can generate revenue after an event.

Last week Emma Jones of Enterprise Nation posed the question “I know about traditional PR – it’s all about getting myself in the press/on radio/on TV but what is online PR and how do I go about being good at it?”

See my response on the Enterprise Nation website.

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) is the trade association for online advertising.

They recently published a Social Media Handbook which contains a contribution from me titled ‘Using social media to increase paid-search marketing effectiveness’.

- Read my contribution here
- Read the full Social Media Handbook online
- Download a PDF copy of the Social Media Handbook

I was lucky enough to attend a listening event of Alesha Dixon’s new album at Volstead club in London with fellow blogger and friend Michele Obi of MYFASHIONLIFE.

The album sounds brilliant (can’t wait to get my hands on it) – I’m no music critic, music journalist or music blogger but I’ll use my blog as an opportunity to describe it as perfect infectious British pop.

The event invite actually came as a surprise. Arriving in my inbox two days prior to the event apparently I had won the tickets? I didn’t realise but weeks ago when I entered my email address to download a free Alesha Dixon track I also entered a competition to attend a listening event.