California Apparel News

Social media is a core part of any good marketingdepartment, and recent college graduates looking for a job in marketing areexpected to be knowledgeable about trends in digital media and e-commerce.

But it isn’t as easy as it looks, so training is important,said Los Angeles–based style blogger Kelsi Smith.

This summer, Smith is launching a new social-mediamarketing course at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising in LosAngeles.

“I can’t tell you how many old-school marketers I comeacross in my day job that still don’t know what they’re doing with socialmedia, so it’s good to have a new generation of graduates ready to go. Thatsaid, a well-rounded marketing background is most important. Social media onlycomplements the traditional marketing avenues.”

Smith’s social-media marketing course will not focus onhow to “share your style” or beauty tips, Smith said.

“This is a professional marketing program teachingstudents to use social media—be that blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube—associal-marketing tools,” she explained.

More than tweeting

FIDM is not the onlyfashion school enhancing its social-media curriculum.
When designer ChristaHalby was looking to expand the online presence of her brand ChristaLouise, she turnedto fashion student Faye Asido for help.
Asido is studyingsocial media and e-commerce as part of her advertising and marketingcommunications degree at New York’s Fashion Institute ofTechnology. The courses are muchmore sophisticated than simply tweeting and blogging, and the skills she’slearning are not something she could learn on her own, she said.

“I don’t thinkstudents can learn on their own how to strategize a way to get the attentionthat’s needed. A lot of planning, editing and creativity is involved in socialmedia and e-commerce because with so much competition you have to find a way tobe different and stand out from the rest,” Asido explained. “You need to bevery good at research and who is your appropriate target market. Not everyonewill be interested in your product, so you have to find out how to target thosewho you think will benefit from what you are trying to sell. Otherwise, socialmedia is pointless and your message will be difficult to come across.”

It was not long agothat leading fashion schools were where aspiring designers went to learn how todraw and design. Now, students are learning how to effectively position a brandonline and manage a Facebook campaign, which are equally crucial skills,according to Gretchen Harnick, an assistant professor of fashion marketing at Parsons Fashion School at The New School for Design inNew York.

“The students are onsocial media, but they don’t understand it from a business perspective and asanother marketing platform,” she said.

Harnick teaches socialmedia and e-commerce as part of her retailing and social-commerce classes. Theretailing course includes e-commerce and mobile commerce, while thesocial-commerce class focuses on social media, social-media marketing andbuilding an online community for fashion brands.

While there has beenincreased demand for the subject matter over the past two years and the courses“always fill up immediately,” they became a required part of the curriculum in2011, Harnick said.

Coursework includesinstruction on multi-channel marketing; web analytics, including Google Analytics andFacebook Insights; in-depth analysis of global case studies, such as asuccessful Facebook or Twitter brand campaign; and social-growth tools, such as Klout and Radian6.

“These are ways torank your brand, and we wanted students to start to think about measurementsand what’s trackable and measurable and how does it tie in to sales. That’swhat marketing is all about,” she explained.
Despite the currentpopularity of fashion bloggers, blogging is not the focus of most students.

“Most are coming toParsons for a pretty fast-paced, hard-core career, and they want to get in andjump right to the top,” Harnick said.

Students are exposedto guest lecturers such as the social-media marketing director for Kenneth Cole and SusanKoger, founder of the online vintage and retro retailer ModCloth. A final projectcould include preparing a social-media marketing plan or a hypothetical digitalmarketing campaign.

Students can alsolearn about new media from their classmates, Harnick said.

“We have a hugeinternational population at Parsons, so the conversations in the classroom arefascinating,” she said. “We have students from mainland China, from SouthAmerica, Korea, and the networks they use are hugely active, so when we look ata brand like Burberry entering the Chinese market, we communicate on the platforms that thosemarkets use. There’s no Facebook in China—they use the social-networkingplatform Weibo,” she said.

Harnick also teachesan online retail course, as well as a two-week social-commerce intensive atParsons’ Paris campus in the summers, where each student has to develop aParis-based fashion trend blog.

Students are alsoencouraged to apply their skills toward job hunting, she said. They teach thestudents to use Twitter for networking and to participate in online chats usingspecific job-related hash tags, such as #jobhuntchat and #internchat. They are encouraged to take internships andattend events such as Social Media Week, a biannual event held around the world toexplore “the social, cultural and economic impact of social media.” Studentsare encouraged to network with fashion brands, retailers, public-relationsagencies and production companies in New York and Los Angeles looking fordigital marketers and social media and e-commerce managers. One of Harnick’sformer students is now interning for Kenneth Cole, and another used her socialmedia and public-relations skills from the Paris course to launch amade-to-measure dress business online.

“I feel that a lot ofstudents don’t realize the power of social media,” said Stephanie Kornblum, afashion marketing student at Parsons. “In the fashion industry, social media ishuge, and brands like DKNY and Bergdorf’s are incredible examples of how fashion brands canutilize social media. If you go on an interview and you can’t name what theirblog name or Twitter handle is, it shows a lack of research and dedication.”

For Smith, FIDM’ s newsocial-media marketing course is a natural extension of the design school’sprograms.

“Social media is aprominent part of marketing, commerce and life in general nowadays,” she said.“As the methods evolve, so must the education and the ways you should andshouldn’t practice marketing on these platforms.”