This past month, I was interviewed for Apparel Magazine’s White Paper on how social media is revolutionizing social media for retailers.

The comprehensive brief is available on APPAREL Magazine’s website, or you can read it in the December issue of the magazine.

Feature: How Are Apparel Companies Using Social Media?
British luxury label Burberry took it one step further, by making select items from the shows available for purchase immediately afterward, and supplying some of its best customers with iPads to browse and purchase from the shows through a special iPad application.
Other apparel and fashion brands are pioneering unique social media ideas, including:

• Marc Jacobs, whom Macala Wright Lee,owner of digital marketing agency Fashionably Digital, says is “one of the few fashion brands that has fully embraced social technology from the outset,” used location-based social media site Foursquare during the recent New York runway shows. Jacobs and Foursquare created a “Fashion Victim” badge, which allowed Fashion Week attendees (and others) to “check-in” at any Marc by Marc Jacobs stores in New York and around the country to unlock the badge. Four people who unlocked the badge in New York were randomly chosen to receive tickets to the Marc Jacobs show, Lee explains. “The partnership provided both Marc Jacobs and Foursquare with low-cost, word-of- mouth marketing,” Lee says. In addition, when launching his first men’s fragrance, called Bang, Jacobs built a Facebook game titled “Bang! You’re it!, where users could “bang” their friends for chances at giveaway prizes…

Apparel companies who truly embrace the social networking philosophy are also doing social things that extend beyond new media, making the philosophy central to their overall branding approach. Fashion etailer Moxsie.com, lifestyle apparel brand Lululemon, and Diesel USA, for example, “are three brands that just ‘get’ it,” says Lee. “Moxsie hosts food trucks for area business employees to have lunch with them on Fridays; Lululemon hosts free yoga classes in their stores on Saturdays; and Diesel inspires Gen Y to live a little with the Faces Of Stupid campaign,” she notes.