In case you don’t remember, seven American fashion bloggers were chosen to become stylists for the UK fashion brand Ted Baker. During a live photo-shoot that took place in London, they were tasked to create a Ted Baker look. Remotely. In 15 minutes. And only using the following digital tools:

• a live video stream to watch what was going on
• a photo gallery of the Ted Baker items they could use
• and Twitter to instruct the stylists on the ground and to react to suggestions from the public

The combination of a live event, the enthusiasm of both bloggers and other participants and a voice-over artist who linked everything together and reacted to incoming Tweets made that it worked amazingly well.

On the night, the event got more than 20,000 visits and the project got mentioned on the likes of PSFK and Mashable.

Below is a video that gives you a very good idea of what the overall experience looked like during the 4 hour extravaganze. They are excerpts of @GlamNiki from The Frisky, @Fashionchalet and @Saucyglossie showing off their Twitter styling skills.

And the guys from Guided, who were leading this project, made a making-off video that explains the overall concept.

Take on Ted with Blogger Gala

RAAK has teamed up with the Guided Collective this week, and tonight we’ll attempt a little web first.

Ted Baker in the US will have seven US fashion bloggers take turns to style a Ted Baker look, live on the web. With nothing but a live video feed and Twitter. How will it work?

The bloggers will go to TakeonTed.com at 6pm London time:
Each will have 15 minutes to create their styles – from a specific wardrobe, instructing the on-the-ground stylist with Twitter;
Everbody can watch and join and make suggestions by including the hashtag #takeonted;
After the bloggers are finished, selected Twitter users will be invited to style;

Simple as that really.

So who are the bloggers?

They are:

For a round up of current Fashion Blogger Relations, read our blogpost here.

Fashion Blogger Relations round up

It would seems that bloggers have a tremendous power of recommendation with their regular audience.

One of our (RAAK’s) biggest successes was doing blogger relations with Katie from What Katie Wore. With one blog post she increased sales of our client fourfold. No kidding.

Even if their audiences are small compared to say traditional magazines, the influence they carry is far greater.

PR thought leader Brian Solis coined the term of marketing to an audience with an audience. Matt Cutts talks about how to get this audience talking to their audience in this video. Old Spice did it in their recent massively succesful campaign, when they made dozens of videos speaking to Twitter users with huge followings on Twitter. These users shared Old Spices videos with these audiences. And the rest is history.

In terms of reach and influence, big bloggers are the pinnacle of this marketing to an audience with an audience principle.

As we gear up to collaborate on another social media project for a fashion brand (Take on Ted), we thought it would be good to do a bit of a round up,  particularly on what big brands are doing with the biggest fashion bloggers.

Not just blogger window dressing

Susie Bubble of the blog Style Bubble remains one of the most interesting fashion bloggers out there. She recently resigned as a features editor with Dazed and Confused to focus solely on her blog. Brave move. But as we pointed out before, her popularity online already exceeded that of the magazine she helped edit.

COS took the perfect tack to rope in Susie’s considerable fashion influence. They actually read her blog! Suzie explains:

COS: Would you like to style the windows of our stores?
Me: Errr…. is this a convincing prank coming from a totally legit-looking domain email?
COS: Nope, we’d like you to style windows at the Regent Street, Covent Garden and Westfield stores.
Me: YES, yes, YES! *Emails boyfriend in excitement as we are both COS fanatics*

The gist of that imaginary convo there is pretty simple. I have indeed expressed my love for COS on numerous occasions and somewhere in COS’ lofty head office, someone picked up on this. “Hey take a look at this chick wearing our clothes in a strange and misshapen way!”

Susie featured the windows in her blog. COS made it clear that the windows were styled by Suzie. The cost? Who knows? The impact? My bet it was huge.

COS loves Susie

Giving Bloggers the opportunity to run a competition on their blogs

Next, let’s take a look at what Björn Borg’s underwear brand has been up to. They approached a number of big bloggers in several countries. Each one of them was incentivised to get their audience to take part in a blog competition, with the blogger and Björn as the judge.

Cocorosa gets creative

Here is Dutch / NY Blogger Cocorosa’s blog post announcing the campaign, and here is Spanish (but London based) Gala Gonzalez’s post.

This was the promotion text:

I’ve teamed up with Björn Borg as the Dutch Blogger (there are about 14 other bloggers representing the other countries) to host the Swedish Exports competition, where you can win a feature on my blog + Bjorn Borgs site and also your weight in Bjorn Borg underwear!

The rules are simple:
Take a photo of how fun, cool, awesome, legendary, good and excellent you look in your Björn Borgs.
Upload your pictures here: SwedishExports.BjornBorg.com before Nov 28th
Keep your fingers crossed!
Me and Bjorn Borg will thereafter pick the coolest pictures to be published on my blog and on Bjorn Borg.

One small piece of criticism here. It would seem as if Björn Borg asked the bloggers to put the same text on their posts. Since many hardened fashionista’s read many top fashion blogs, this ain’t cool. It makes the campaign seem more like old school advertising and less spontaneous. This does not make BB or the bloggers look cool. I’m left wondering: is Björn really going to work with each blogger?

But still, that is small beef. This was a great idea because it helps bloggers build their audience.

Blogger look styling

The Spanish brand Mango also got bloggers like Gala in to create some looks together with other bloggers. She explains:

This summer has been full of great stories and amazing moments. And..work,tons of work. But for me,I just don’t really see it as “work”, because whatever I do that involves fashion and creativity, is just the best way to spend my time and energies to keep learning and discovering new things.So, in july ,MANGO invited me to participate in their new online campaign, creating, with the gorgeous and super funny Hanneli, 2 looks for their “What Should I wear?” stories.

Blogger Gala styling at Mango

And here is the video that’s a result of that. You may notice that Mango tries to pit the bloggers against each other in a blogger vs blogger format.

Now here’s a minor point of criticism. Why the Gala vs Haneli format? Gala does not even mention it on her own blog and I’m sure Haneli did not like that angle of the campaign either. Fashion is notoriously bitchy and competitive as it is. I am sure the bloggers would have preferred to just style together. Neither does the ‘versus vibe’ add anything for consumers.

Otherwise, another good way to get your product in front of a blogger’s audience.

No competition please, we are peers

H & M did much the same as Mango, getting bloggers to style looks, but without the competitive element. Cocorosa and Gala took part (amongst many others).

Blogger Cocorosa for H&M

Getting bloggers to do your product development

Last but not the least there is a collaborative design model, first made popular by stars like Kate Moss designing for brands like Topshop. Writes blogger Karla, from Karla’s Closet:

A few months back, my friends at Coach contacted me and a few other bloggers about designing a handbag for them. It’s been such a fun experience working with their team and I’m so excited I finally get to show you guys the final product! It will be available on 5/19 for pre-orders online.

Karla's Closet for Coach

Now this co-designing model is of course the hardest to pull off. Where do you draw the line? How do the bloggers and designers collaborate? Who makes the final decisions?

But for bloggers it’s the most creative and rewarding of them all. They get to grow their audience and get to look good. They are very likely to love your brand.

And because of this they are very likely to promote the hell out of the product on their blog.

When doing blogger relations, bear in mind

This blog would not have been possible without the assistance of fashion guru Laura Villasenin, founder of Miista, a fashion forward footwear brand based in Hackney, London. Full disclosure, she’s my partner too

London Blogger Katie

But in the current media climate – do you know how to get it? Ah yes, bloggers are a sure fire way to get good targeted eyeballs. But have you tried approaching them?

RAAK built a social media ready SEO enhanced website for fashion brand WHERE (Full disclosure: Their designer Laura Villasenin is my partner). It’s a new fashion brand that needs all the exposure – awareness and word of mouth – it can get.

But we knew we wanted it to be featured in one of the huge fashion blogs. They can drive massive amounts of traffic, increase your Google Pagerank, and a blog recommendation carries a lot of weight.

A blog like Stylebubble would be perfect. But Susie of Stylebubble is a very busy lady these days.

But then we read Brian Solis’s piece on the so called magic middle bloggers:

The best communications strategies will encompass not only authorities in new and traditional media but also those voices in the “Magic Middle” of the attention curve, because they help carry information and discussions among your customers directly, in a true peer-to-peer approach. The Magic Middle is defined as the bloggers who have from 20-1,000 other people linking to them. It is this group that enables PR people to reach The Long Tail, and its effects on the bottom line are measurable.

Brian made the point that the star bloggers of this world – are so busy, so famous – that they are no longer approachable. And even if they feature your product its often a once off. This is because they are also hard to build a relationship with. And building a relationship with a blogger can take you so much further. Especially if it’s a blogger on the up.

So we went for a magic middle blogger – and it worked big time.

Now I have to confess that RAAK actually did very little in this instance than provide some good advice. Laura did the rest herself. Here is how she got blogger relations spot on:

1. She did her research and found an up and coming fashion blogger – Katie that writes What Katie Wore.

Katie’s blog is popular, she routinely gets 20 plus comments on each post – times that by at least 100 to get an idea of how many visitors she gets to a post. But she’s not in the league of Fashion Toast (yet).

2. She followed Katies’s blog and Twitter account – and listened.

She liked what Katie did, and thought her sense of style was a good fit with her designs. she found out they lived around the corner from each other. Match!

3. She contacted Katie herself. There was no agent involved.

Bloggers don’t want to be approached by marketing and PR types that are far removed from a brand. They want the real deal. If you’re a fashion company the designer is as good as it gets. If you’re a company like Hewlett Packard that make electronics goods, and you’re blogging about photocopiers – it’s probably the photocopier product manager that you want to speak to. Why? Bloggers want knowledgeable people that are close to a product or service. They wan’t a marketese free environment. This is supposed to be a conversation remember.

4. Laura had a good product which she sent to Katie to check out.

A nice face and a great personality might get you far, but if your product is a lemon, don’t waste your time. This is word of mouth media, and the recommender’s (In this case Katie) reputation is on the line.

5. She had a website that could cater for the inevitable traffic rise that a blog would send, and we tried to maximise the viral effect – a social home base.

The site had WordPress’s Super Cache installed, just in case it was hit my a Tsunami of crazed shoppers. And we installed Tweetmemes Tweet this button. Ride the social wave.

And hey presto, look at the result!