Lucky FABB Conference Recap: "Big Brands & You"

This week, I attended the FABB (Fashion & Beauty Blog) Conference hosted by Lucky magazine What an AMAZING experience! The panelists shared straight-talk advice about what it really takes to build a successful business as a blogger and create partnerships with fashion and beauty companies.

The first panel of the day was entitled “Big Brands and You.” This session was moderated by Brandon Holley, Editor in Chief of Lucky
and featured the following panelists:

Kerry Diamond, VP, Public Relations and Communications, Lancôme
Mallory Andrews, SVP, Sales Promotion, Marketing and Public Relations, Bergdorf Goodman
David Duplantis, SVP, Global Web and Digital Media, Coach

Here’s a recap of what the panelists shared about branding and blogging:

Kerry Diamond: "As a blogger, you have to have a unique point of view. There are so many blogs out there today, and if you’re just rewriting press releases, you’re not doing yourself any service. Blogs are businesses too. You need to be businesspeople and understand what your worth is. When you write a post about a company, send a link to someone at that company. Don’t ever think you’re a bother if you just send a link to the PR contact at certain company. I would appreciate that a lot.

Another important thing to remember is that working with beauty companies is a two way street. We would love to hear ideas from you. You can call us with ideas. You can email us. I would be thrilled to hear about a special project that you would like to do. We really don’t hear a lot from bloggers in terms of going above and beyond product and information requests. This is going to be the year of more blog partnerships. You may not get an answer or response right away. Don’t give up! Use a creative subject line that will help your email stand out.”

Brandon Holley: “When pitching ideas to our magazine or to a company, really read the magazine and really know the product. If you know Coach and you understand that company, don’t send the same idea to Burberry. Think about the company you’re writing to and know about what they are already doing. As a magazine editor and brand manager, we need your ideas. It’s important to have your own point of view, because there are a lot of blogs out there. It’s getting to maximum capacity in the blog world, so you have to think about breaking your blog and your voice out of the pack. “

Mallory Andrews: “As you develop relationships , start reaching out to companies with creative ideas. Our social media manager has relationships with a lot of bloggers and when they get together, a lot of ideas evolve. Iit’s a natural progression of what they are doing on their blog and what we are interested in . We recently collaborated with Felicia from the blog ThisThatBeauty , and that just came out of a conversation . Building relationships and working together is how these ideas and these partnerships come about.”

David Duplantis: “The really exciting thing for you as bloggers is that you are building their your own brand. You are the steward of that brand and you should be really true and authentic to that. Really focus your efforts on who you want to be. When choosing a blogger to work with, I look at relevance and great personal style and I think about how that integrates with our brand. There are blogs out there that I read and that I think are fantastic, but they just aren’t right for Coach.

When we create our media plan at Coach, we integrate bloggers into that plan. Each month we choose a guest blogger to be an editorial contributor on our site. We really treat bloggers like magazine editors. We invite them in to see product before anyone else, and we give them an insider’s view. Coach has a million people online at our website every month, and our guest bloggers draft off of that traffic. We have 1.6 million fans on Facebook and 300,000 followers on Twitter. Our work with bloggers is completely integrated and we spread the word through all of those channels and the bloggers really benefit as a result of that.”

You can watch the entire conversation with Brandon, Kerry, Mallory & David here!

Watch live streaming video from smw_newyork2 at livestream.com

tags: Social Media Week, Lucky magazine, Lucky FABB, SMW, Lancome, Coach, Bergdorf Goodman