The NFL Takes the Ol’ Straight-Arm to Mid-Game Twittering

If you have watched ESPN at all during the past few days, you probably heard the reports that Chad Ochocinco (yes that is his name, he officially changed it last year) plans on twittering before, during and after professional games this season.  Of course, this had commentators and other members of the league up in arms.  The NFL currently does not even allow mobile phones on the sidelines during games.

Well, it appears the NFL has decided to take a stance.  According to a report from Mashable, the NFL is banning in-game tweeting.  No penalties have been set as of yet.

Ochocinco, of course, has responded on his Twitter page, wondering if he would still get paid if he were to get suspended for twittering.  Folks, this man is a character.  While in-game twitter,ing is unnecessary and obstructive (we are all watching the game anyway, we saw that touchdown, thank you), I do plan on paying attention closer to Chad’s tweets.  This man sure knows how to stir things up.

-Andrea

It’s no secret that the fashion industry has been struggling significantly during difficult economic times. Just yesterday, a post on NY Mag’s The Cut warned of the grave danger in which the Christian Lacroix house has found itself after having filed for bankruptcy this past May.  My mind turned to a vision of the fantastic beaded Lacroix T-shirt that was paired with Guess? blue jeans on the first Vogue cover to ever feature jeans – a profound shift in Vogue’s message about what constitutes fashion. I shed a silent tear.

While upsetting, the constraints placed on today’s designers by the economic climate create an interesting opportunity for exciting change in the fashion industry.  Five years ago, no one would have imagined that Karl Lagerfeld would be designing a line for H&M – and yet it has happened, and the line received huge success. In many senses, access to quality fashion has become much more democratized – something which should have perhaps happened long ago, but there was no impetus to do so until it meant sink or swim for brands.

So what is next on the agenda for fashion designers?  Will Karl Lagerfeld be tweeting?  Well, perhaps not yet, but an article in the June 24 issue of WWD took an interesting look at the way that fashion designers are beginning to interact with the twittersphere.  Designers including Betsey Johnson, Donna Karan and Charlotte Ronson are recognizing the utility of free social media as a powerful marketing tool. In the iconic world of fashion, where labels and identity are often (and sometimes too) intertwined, Twitter affords fashion-lovers the opportunity to connect with their beloved brands on an even more personal level.

And speaking of personal, what I personally would love to see is designers not necessarily tweeting about deals and discounts, which I feel might “cheapen” (for lack of a better word) the image of such historically established houses as Chanel, Dior or Lanvin, but to instead see Alber Elbaz tweeting about his design inspirations, favorite pieces from his new collection, thoughts on the messages he wishes to convey through his work. I am reminded of the American Express ad featuring Diane Von Furstenberg, which I always found embarrassingly inspiring for a television commercial. Clothing is personal – it is a form of artistic expression that can become even more meaningful if we know from what vision it came to materialize. How much more fun would it be to wear a fabulous Marc Jacobs coat when Marc himself has twittered the story behind it?  This is a whole new way of interacting with fashion and I am anxious to see how designers will play with it.

-Kristin

Last night, VH1 debuted  The Great Debate, a new show that asks people to answer pop-culture questions, in real time, through various social media channels. The model for the show is a broadcast first, Brandweek explains:

Through an interactive platform provided by LocaModa, viewers comment and vote through real-time text messaging at 300 Zoom Media & Marketing nightlife locations, at Viacom’s jumbo HD screen in Times Square, and on Facebook and Twitter.

Thanks to VH1, I’ll finally get to be on television.

-Maria

While everyone was stuffing themselves with barbecue and watching fireworks this weekend, The New York Times published an article that’s a must-read for all PR folks. The piece examines how the profession of public relations is changing in the digital age — it’s becoming more about bloggers and online influencers and less about just traditional print and broadcast journalists. Yet publicists are still necessary, because someone needs to know who these people are and how best to reach them.

The article also briefly touches upon the need for a new system of PR metrics, which is a topic we are constantly exploring here at M Booth:

Instead of calculating the impressions an article gets by estimating a publication’s circulation and pass-along rate, [Brian] Solis counts the number of people who tweeted about a company and their combined following, the number of retweets or clicks on links, as well as traffic from Facebook and other social networks.

Many people don’t realize that the PR profession is about much more than straight-up media relations, but it is — and it’s continuing to change before our eyes.

—Alyssa

What would the most interesting man in the world look like?  What should he wear?  The ad folks behind Dos Equis’ new campaign seem to think the most interesting man in the world is in his mid-fifties, a tad overweight and sports a salt and pepper beard.

My first problem with their vision of the most interesting man in the world is that they didn’t pick me. Secondly, what’s with the beard?  Interesting guys don’t have beards; beards are for the emotionally disturbed (except in the winter time, that’s open season for beards).  Not only are beards for the emotionally disturbed, but they’re typically temporary and regrettable: Al Gore loses the election, goes nuts, grows a beard, wins a Nobel, comes to his senses, shaves and will forever look back on those beard-day pictures and feel worse than he did when the highest office of our land was stolen from him by really smart bonobo. I digress. I agree that the most interesting man in the world would be on the older side, but I doubt he’d wear a plain black suit.  He’d put together outfits mixing articles from different cultures and generations while making it look effortless.

The frontman for the Dos Equis campaign may have been miscast, but people are responding to him anyway.  The Dos Equis Most Interesting Man in the World has almost 52,000 friends on Facebook (while the real most interesting man in the world, me, has only 370).  That’s pretty impressive, especially given that the campaign isn’t that old.  Even more impressive is that Dos Equis has actually gotten a bunch of people to create profiles on the campaign webpage, where users take courses and tests in “The Academy.”  It’s astounding to me that people have the time and motivation to do this.  It seems to me that the people who would actually have enough time to take bogus courses from the Dos Equis guy would also be the same people who would be too lazy to have Internet installed in their apartments.  So who’s doing this?  (I only did it because I thought the site was about me.  Being the most interesting man in the world does not make me immune to vanity.)

-Tom