Archive for the ‘social media’ Category

Newer Entries »

Using Twitter More Effectively: Unfollow Everyone?

February 24th, 2009 by AV Flox in Twitter, social media

Loic Le Meur, the serial entrepreneur and CEO of Seesmic, the vlogging web application, has unfollowed almost everyone on Twitter. Until recently, Le Meur used auto-follow script that would immediately add anyone who was following him for him.

“I enjoyed it,” he says in his blog. “I thought that if anybody cared enough to follow me I should also follow them back in return and read my ‘personal firehose’ when I had some free time, instead of watching TV for example. Actually I never watch TV but you get the idea! I learnt a lot by following all my community and it has been a really enjoyable experience.”

But auto-respond tools, which send out generic “thanks for following! I can’t wait to tweet with you! Come to my site!” direct messages started to get on Le Meur’s nerves. As the popularity of these tools increased, it became nearly impossible for Le Meur to use his direct messages effectively.

Le Meur calls it “heavy robot attack,” and it sounds dramatic until you imagine the blitzkrieg resulting from the number of followers continuously added to his following list.

These auto-direct messages are not new. But they do seem to be becoming more popular. The reasoning for using them is beyond me. An automated message immediately says to me, “I’m too lazy to really get to know you.”

I’ll admit that I have 552 pending requests from people following me on Twitter right now. But I would rather browse their profiles as time allows and, if I send them a note, personalizing it based on their bio and recent tweets. Twitter is about community after all, and getting to know one another. Why should you look at my website if I didn’t even bother to personalize a message to you?

It’s spamming and I can’t think of a worse way to start a relationship.

But was that the only thing that prompted Le Meur to unfollow almost everyone?

“Following or friending thousands of friends or everybody is so 2009 [sic] and @scobleizer -ish,” Le Meur said in a tweet late last night in response to talk about his massive unfollowing on Twitter. “In 2009, we want quality not quantity.”

It goes back to the discussion that seems to have taken over in many social media circles in the past couple of months.

Blogger and tech evangelist Robert Scoble, who follows 69,304 people on Twitter, did not miss the shot at him, either. He immediately joined the discussion.

“I use tools so that I can follow both small groups and big groups,” Scoble told Le Meur in a tweet. “Friendfeed’s lists, for instance, or TweetDeck’s groups. Try it!”

But even the grouping feature of TweetDeck, a microblogging platform that competes with Seesmic’s Twhirl wasn’t enough for Le Meur to keep up with his 23,000 followers.

“I used to believe what you said,” Le Meur responded. “I was autofollowing too, this is all bullshit and you know it.”

He pointed out that Scoble himself had stopped using the auto-follow script on Twitter.

“You need to reboot yourself,” Le Meur added. “10,000s of ‘real’ following and friends are so 2008. Get over it, it is just passe, over, finished.”

He and Scoble took the discussion to the telephone. Suddenly, Scoble wasn’t so sure about his tens of thousands of followers anymore. He commented in a tweet: “On the phone @loic makes a lot of sense. Following doesn’t matter now that we have search.twitter.com and friendfeed.”

And so the “unfollow everyone” movement was born. It’s a misnomer—Loic Le Meur is still following 161 people. But you get the picture.

Scoble immediately opened up the discussion on FriendFeed, which allows for lengthier responses than the standard 140 characters of Twitter.

During the discussion, which received nearly 200 comments, artist and blogger Pete Gilbert brought up a good point about Twhirl: “Loic’s company makes a Twitter client. Surely he should build tools into that client to make the overload problem more manageable and certainly not try to set a trend of ‘hey it’s cool to unfollow lots of people now.’ That sort of sends the wrong message to people about your company and it’s thinking.”

He’s right, as mentioned, Le Meur uses the desktop microblogging client Twhirl, which was acquired by Seesmic in early 2008. How his actions will affect user perception of Twhirl remains to be seen.

For what it’s worth, in his blog post about his decision to unfollow people, Le Meur made a commitment to figuring out a way to solve the DM spam problem for Twhirl users. He also assured followers Twhirl was working hard on the filter function in a tweet.

“I am confident we will find a solution,” he says. “Until then, I will remain with a small following list that I will grow one by one daily and remove anybody attacking me again with a robot.”

As of the publishing of this post, Robert Scoble has not followed suit in unfollowing everyone.

What do you think–is massive unfollowing the way to solve the problem?

pass it on!
[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [kirtsy] [Ma.gnolia] [Mixx] [Propeller] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Email] More »

Tags: , , , , ,
17 Comments Comments



The Bad Facebook Friend: Meaningful Connections, Weak Ties and Parasocial Relationships

February 20th, 2009 by AV Flox in social media

I have 450 friends on Facebook and I often wish I didn’t. Since day one, I maade a point to accept friend requests from anyone who asked in order to allow them access to me, which I feel is important when you spend as much time as I do online. Maybe they liked my blog, maybe they saw me on Twitter, maybe we know some of the same people—whatever the reason, they want to connect and I wasn’t going to let formalities get in the way.

But I have found that connecting doesn’t lead to forming a meaningful relationship. Connecting is easy: it requires a couple of clicks. Forging a relationship takes time and energy.

“Within Internet Marketing, I have developed some solid relationships with and would work with them, partner with them, and/or hang out with them at the drop of a dime,” Tony Adam writes in his post, Keys to building quality relationships and things to avoid. “The problem here is that there are people that don’t understand there is big difference between someone that is a contact vs. someone that you have established a relationship with and the value of that relationship.”

The investment into 450 people in terms of time and energy is a big one, and one that I can’t meet. It’s made me into what my best friend Atherton Bartelby calls “a bad Facebook friend”: one who doesn’t comment on your updates or posts or regularly look over your photos.

It reminds me of that piece in the New York Times Magazine Brave New World of Digital Intimacy by Clive Thompson, that came out in the fall of last year:

In 1998, the anthropologist Robin Dunbar argued that each human has a hard-wired upper limit on the number of people he or she can personally know at one time. Dunbar noticed that humans and apes both develop social bonds by engaging in some sort of grooming; apes do it by picking at and smoothing one another’s fur, and humans do it with conversation. He theorized that ape and human brains could manage only a finite number of grooming relationships: unless we spend enough time doing social grooming — chitchatting, trading gossip or, for apes, picking lice — we won’t really feel that we “know” someone well enough to call him a friend.

Dunbar noticed that ape groups tended to top out at 55 members. Since human brains were proportionally bigger, Dunbar figured that our maximum number of social connections would be similarly larger: about 150 on average. Sure enough, psychological studies have confirmed that human groupings naturally tail off at around 150 people: the “Dunbar number,” as it is known. Are people who use Facebook and Twitter increasing their Dunbar number, because they can so easily keep track of so many more people?

Thompson’s conclusion, after speaking with many “aggressively social people” was that the Dunbar number was not being increased. Online interaction has the ability to enrich relationships by keeping people connected, but deep relationships require more. The main change, Thompson noted, seemed to be among people’s “weak ties,” that is, their acquaintances or contacts.

Contacts are not a bad thing. I don’t think, for example, that a solution to my being a bad Facebook friend is to prune my list. I don’t want to shut people out. I just want to interact in a more meaningful way.

I just don’t know there’s enough time in the day to do it.

I KNOW YOU PARASOCIALLY

When I met Brian Solis at the TechZulu anniversary party last week, I told him I was fond of his musings on the web and social media. He asked me whether we knew one another and I told him, “I know you parasocially.”

He laughed. And it is funny—it’s funny to recognize it and call it like it is. I might know where he had dinner and what he’s reading because of Twitter, but I don’t know him at all and I recognize this.

That’s a parasocial relationship: a one-sided consumption of information where one of the parties knows a lot about the other, but the other party is completely oblivious about the former’s existence. This used to be more common among celebrities and their fans, but in an era of oversharing, many non-celebrities are gathering audiences that know a great deal about us. They feel close with us because of how much is shared by us on the daily, whether via our blogs, or microblogging platforms like Twitter, or through our photos on Flickr and videos on YouTube and Vimeo. Maybe we’re even Facebook “friends.”

But it doesn’t mean anything because there’s no real relationship.

QUALITY CONTACTS

“The real value is in the quality of the relationship and not the quantity of contacts,” says Adam—and he’s right.

In A list of 10 social media habits that I am stopping immediately, John Welsh announces that he will no longer ignore people he adds on Facebook after accepting their request.

“As soon as I accept a ‘friend request, I write a comment on their wall,” Welsh writes. “Why did I imagine that accepting a ‘friend request’, and not saying hello, was anything but rude?”

He’s right, but that’s not all there is to it. A relationship is more than a DM or an e-mail or @replies or comments on your photos or a funny back and forth on Facebook walls. Hell, a relationship is more than sporadic IM conversations, e-mails and even phone calls. A relationship is a social commitment.

“Relationships, whether they’re on Twitter, Facebook, or any other social network, are held to the same guiding and ethical principles of those we cherish in the real world,” says Brian Solis in his piece Finding the Tweet Spot – Top Tips for Building Twitter Relationships. “Think of them as investments where the ROI is intelligence, social capital, respect, trust, and friendship. Individuals on both sides must realize mutual benefits and advantages for cultivating short-term or long-term relationships. You are equally responsible for contributing ongoing value.”

The piece by Solis is full of ways to maximize one’s connections online. My favorite bit of advice: “Remember, always pay it forward and never forget to pay it back… it’s how you got here and it defines where you’re going.”

SCRATCH MY BACK…
I’LL TOTES SCRATCH YOURS AFTER I’M DONE SCRATCHING THE BACKS OF 449 OTHER PEOPLE!

Ask anyone about what a relationship is and you’ll hear something about giving as much as you take. The biggest issues I have had in interpersonal relationships have come about as a result of one party feeling they’re giving more than they’re getting, so it’s no surprise that this is one of the biggest complaints in social media.

“Big names don’t like coming to events because people are always asking something,” someone explained to me at a recent tech event in Los Angeles.

Everyone talks about the popularity contest in social media, the race for more followers, for higher trends and better grades. What about the flip side? The day you can’t go on IM because your screen explodes with 50 different “friends” asking something? The night of some big event when your phone blows up with texts and calls from “friends” wondering if you can get them in?

Even from the nosebleed section, I can see it’s a hell of lonely place down there, center stage, with all eyes on you. You just can’t do it all. Even if you want to, you just can’t. We’re overextended.

Even I, with only (only?) 450 Facebook friends and 2,350 Twitter followers, am over my head.

I want to make good on my social commitment. I would love to read the blog of every person who reads my blog and retweet every person who has ever retweeted me and answer every e-mail and every phone call. But as the barriers go down, as we interact with more and more people, it becomes harder to do this. I feel, more often than not, that it’s not that people are too important to be bothered, but that we can’t do it all. The web annihilated geographic boundaries, but there are still only so many hours in the day.

How do you strike a balance? How do you remain accessible to all who want to reach out, foster meaningful relationships, and still have enough hours in the day to work and play and rest?

pass it on!
[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [kirtsy] [Ma.gnolia] [Mixx] [Propeller] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Email] More »

Tags: , , , , , ,
10 Comments Comments



Sexy Snacks: How To Make Web Like A Porn Site

January 17th, 2009 by AV Flox in intarwebz, interview, social media

POPPORN.com offers an light-hearted spin on adult entertainment industry news and events and provides regular fun, irreverent video content. I caught wind of it when they added me on Twitter a couple of weeks ago. I knew right away I had to get some more information, so I shot off an e-mail to editor-in-command Brian Bangs to get the skinny on how the site came about, how they’re making use of social media to gain popularity and where they wanna take their vision.

When did POPPORN get started and what’s the concept behind it?

POPPORN started unofficially in March of this year. Our goal with the site was to create something that offered a totally different perspective on the adult industry and then cross over adult and mainstream content.

It seems that even as the adult industry continues to reach into the mainstream there aren’t many sites dedicated to this concept. Sure, you have adult industry news sites which serve a great purpose, but they don’t really offer much to the casual adult fan.

POPPORN tries to create an environment that can reach into a more wide-spread demographic and retain a sense of humor about what adult content is.

How did the idea come about?

The idea was kind of a fluke. We are all amateur film makers with an interest in the adult business and I’m kind of a project guy so we decided at last year’s AVN [the Oscars of adult entertainment] to bring a camera and interview folks. Our perspective is a little more skewed than most adult news or review agencies and the folks and studios we covered really liked what we were doing: giving adult an attitude and opinion. So we figured creating a blog where this content could reside made the most sense. Sort of right time scenario.

Do you feel the industry has a need for this kind of angle?

I’m not sure there was a need for what we were doing, It would be a little arrogant to believe that, but I think what we saw was a void in the market for this kind of content. We knew that we could do something a little different that could put an edge on adult content, yet still keep it more mainstream for folks who aren’t diehard porn fanatics, while at the same time, adding a little levity to the adult industry as a whole.

So you see yourself developing into a mainstream-adult industry hybrid media outlet, a sort of sex for the common man, fun, accessible and real.

I would be cautious in saying we believe we can become a mainstream porn outlet, I don’t see that as a goal. But I do see us as being a fun resource for folks who are either into porn or curious about porn. A site that can give a laugh while still giving folks a valuable look into the adult industry.

Would you say it was accurate to say POPPORN was an SNL-meets-The Onion of adult entertainment?

Hmm, I never thought about the SNL angle, but maybe, yes.

Are you making money with the site? If not, how do you finance your endeavors?

We are making money off of the site. We sell advertising and while it’s not making us rich, it runs our site.

A lot of people are getting on the social media bandwagon—obviously Twitter was how we connected initially. How has that been working for you?

I think that taking advantage of social networking is the key in a web 2.0 environment. Twitter and Myspace have been excellent resources in helping folks find us who may not have had the opportunity to find us in the past. Those networking sites spread like wildfire and we’ve been very successful with finding new readers taking advantage of them.

Honestly, the success we have had has been through a lot of persistence and word of mouth. We’ve just focused on trying to create something new and unique, something that we are proud of that makes us laugh. It seems that kind of attention to the process has resulted in folks responding very positively and it’s trickled down from there via word of mouth.

What are your visions for POPPORN in the future?

A ton. We actually launched a sweepstakes for this year’s AEE [Adult Entertainment Expo] show sponsored by AVN so we’ll be running around shooting tons of content there. We’re also shooting the red carpet at the AVN Awards with Wicked Pictures contract star Jessica Drake, she’s co-hosting with our host Spock Buckton and then in the New Year we are shooting our first adult film. We are partnering with a major adult studio to bring our retardation to a living room near you!

What’s your first film about?

Our first film is kind of classified at the moment. Ideas tend to get ripped off like crazy in the adult business but it will tie into POPPORN very directly and feature a lot of the characters and stars we feature on the site.

As filmmakers do you eventually see yourselves eventually running your own studio?

We are considering developing into a studio; however, there is so much bad porn out there we want to take it very slow to make sure what we put out is worth the consumers’ dollars.

What do you mean when you talk about bad porn?

There is an influx of cheap, poorly-made porn. Bad lighting, poor production values, etc. When someone tries to make a funny adult film, it’s rarely funny. I mean, watch Not The Bradys XXX and you will see what I mean. As for how we can improve on it—I think that we have a certain personality that will come through in our films.

POPPORN isn’t currently looking for talent for their debut film, but they’ll always take your n00dz.

pass it on!
[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [kirtsy] [Ma.gnolia] [Mixx] [Propeller] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Email] More »

Tags: , , , ,
2 Comments Comments



New Brand World: What’s Your Brand?

January 10th, 2009 by AV Flox in intarwebz, personal brand, social media

I had a friend in high school who dressed a provocatively and was constantly fighting with people about her right to her self-expression. One evening while spending time with her boyfriend, she defended her fashion choices by saying: “just because I dress like a slut doesn’t mean I’m a slut.”

I will never forget his response. There was nothing moral in it, just logic: “if you saw someone walking down the street in a police uniform, would you assume they were a police officer or would you think they were just expressing themselves?”

It reminds me of a saying my mother says to this day: haste fama y échate a la cama, which translated from the Spanish means, “make your fame and lay in bed.”

(It’s a little like the saying “you’ve made your bed, now lie in it,” but it goes further because in this case you don’t have to actually make the bed, you just have to give the impression that you have in order to have to lie in it.)

You can imagine how irritating an adolescent focused on her self-expression and unconcerned with the repercussions of her actions or demeanor found such a saying. If I didn’t learn the lesson well enough then, I am certainly am now: in social media, image is everything. We shape this image by what we say and what we do, but, perhaps more importantly, by how people perceive these things.

Recently, I wrote about Chris Brogan and how the public received his work for Kmart through IZEA. More than what he said or how, the fact that he was working with IZEA for Kmart did a lot to shape the public’s view of who he is.

Image matters. How other people perceive you is as important as what you’re actually doing.

BRAND! BRAND! BRAND!

We’re all brands now, whether we like it or not, and everything we do and say affects the image of this brand. Suddenly, we’re not really making choices based only on the immediate satisfaction of our desires or return on investment, but in terms of how this decision is going to be seen by others.

Recently, at a party with a lot of people in the Los Angeles tech scene, I remember thinking I could use the opportunity to get some fodder for a column I’m writing for BlogHer about how improve one’s sex life in 2009.

Despite being a fun, laid back crowd, a lot of the people I spoke with told me they would be glad to share suggestions on the condition that I did not reveal who they were because discussing sex—anything about it—was not something that they wanted associated with their personal brand.

More recently, my friend and Mashable contributor Atherton Bartelby found that someone had made a fake Twitter account using his first name and photo. It was supposed to be a joke made by a mutual follower, but Bartelby took it very seriously. He didn’t think that the content was conducive to maintaining the sort of image he wants to have online. Fortunately, the person who made that account understood the situation and took it down immediately. But there are people who don’t have such respect for people’s image or reputation.

A case in point are the recent hacks on Twitter. Last weekend, 33 high profile accounts on Twitter were hacked. The Fox News Twitter feed announced that Bill O’Reilly was gay, Barrack Obama’s account had a fake contest with US$500-worth of gasoline as a prize, and Britney Spears’s account updated her 14,075 followers on the size of her vagina.

In regard to the breach, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told Wired over e-mail that the company is addressing the security issues that allowed the breach, and doing “a full security review on all access points to Twitter. More immediately, we’re strengthening the security surrounding sign-in. We’re also further restricting access to the support tools for added security.”

As Problogger and Twitip founder Darren Rowse points out, “Twitter is increasingly being targeted by malicious attacks and should serve as a warning to those using Twitter to expect the unexpected… Twitter does seem to be moving towards a more secure system with an beta test of OAuth scheduled for later this month, but until it goes live (and even after it) be a little more alert than normal.”

Security issues on Twitter may be resolved, but the incident raises red flags: in a world where we’re investing so much time and energy building ourselves, what’s worse than the idea that our personal brands can be so easily compromised?

“Branding is experience in time, and the brand becomes a series of interrelated behaviors,” writes Jonathan Baskin in Branding Only Works on Cattle.

YOUR BRAND IS STICKING OUT

Ages ago, sometime after I started becoming more active on Twitter, I partook in a chat with Laura Fitton’s tribe. I don’t recall exactly what we were talking about, but at one point, I remember Fitton saying to me, “you’re fabulous. I can tell that’s your brand.”

I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about, but I took it as a compliment—who doesn’t want to be fabulous?

I thought about this comment again during a conversation about personal brands with social media maven Damien Basile. He commented on how dichotomous I was, pointing out that if someone found me through my blog, they’d be likely to assume I was one more social media commentator, whereas if they looked at my Twitter stream, they’d think I was more focused on relationships and lifestyle.

“You’re a conundrum!” he exclaimed. A fabulous conundrum?

Whereas people are multifaceted, brands that are associated with a clear mission have proved time and time again to have more success than those who don’t. So instead of sitting around looking for resolutions to kick off the year, I decided to do something a little different: write my mission and values and address my personal brand from there.

LABEL ME

“The mission announces exactly where you are going, and the values describe the behaviors that will get you there,” wrote Jack Welch in Winning.

I must have stared at the screen for two hours. Finally—and perhaps more out of exasperation than real inspiration or vision—I typed out the following: “My mission is to become a top commentator on how the internet is shaping our lives. I plan to do this by regularly providing information that is accessible and thought-provoking to readers, despite their level of involvement in web culture.”

The statement is likely to change as I refine it, but that’s OK. The idea is to create something solid on which you can stand, then building on top of that.

What’s your mission? Does your “brand” reflect it?

Further Reading:
5 Steps for Planning the Direction of Your Blog in 2009 by Darren Rowse.
The Thing About Goals by Seth Godin

pass it on!
[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [kirtsy] [Ma.gnolia] [Mixx] [Propeller] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Email] More »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
5 Comments Comments



Age of Turbulence: How 1928 Is Using Social Media to Weather the Economic Storm

December 31st, 2008 by AV Flox in social media


still from a promo short for 1928, used with permission.

The web is a wonderful tool and I’m always on the look-out for how people and companies are using it to achieve their goals, whether these are to meet new people or build brand loyalty.

After watching 1928 Jewelry Company’s surreal promo shorts on YouTube, I shot a direct message to Macala Wright, their director of marketing and public relations, and demanded that she fill me in on the jewelry company’s vision for integrating new media in their marketing efforts.

What’s 1928 Jewelry and where did the concept come from?

1928 Jewelry was founded in 1968 by Mel Bernie. Mel loved high-end, expensive costume and couture jewelry, made from solid gold and sterling silver, using semi-precious and precious gemstones, which made the pieces extremely expensive.

One day, Mel was in downtown L.A. and found a place that did gold plating and created faux pieces. He wondered if there would be any interest the the jewelry from department stores, so set up few appointments to showcase the pieces he had selected, all vintage and art deco style jewelry, recreated to match the couture pieces in everything but the price. In one week, he’d sold $30,000 worth. 1928 was born.

How is 1928 using the internet to drive and promote their brand?

The internet is largely new territory for us. We’ve spent the last three months developing a holistic approach to online marketing that incorporates social media marketing, PPC and search engine optimization. We’ve approached it very strategically and gone slowly because we don’t want to do what a lot of brands out there do right now, which is just create noise.

We embrace the idea of engaging our customer, but we also want to take it a step further, we want to engage them, to show them why we should have the privilege to be a part of their lives. We take that privilege seriously so anything we do has to be relevant to that goal. Every woman has a story to tell, and we want to help her tell it.

Do you have a clear-cut plan for harnessing the power of web 2.0 in selling your brand?

Web 2.0 tools are the primary focus we are using for building brand awareness. Most women over the age of 30 have heard of 1928 Jewelry. Now we’re targeting a younger market and showing a woman under 30 that we are for her too. We are where she lives–the videos and photo shoot reflect that. Modern and urban, while being timeless and beautiful. We have an online series planned for 2009 that will really help us drive this home.

So the plan is ever evolving. We have a framework for what we want to accomplish with web 2.0 marketing tools, but we’ve left a lot of fluidity and flexibility in that plan when it comes to social media, video and online promotions. If something screams, “You have to do this! And do it now!” because it’s leading to positive results, then we are able to adapt the strategy quickly.

You never know who you’re gonna meet on the web. Twitter has been a driving factor in connecting with stylists that landed us several opportunities to have a large number of pieces in independent and mainstream film. We designed Hermione’s earrings in Harry Potter. The videos have given 1928 online credibility and have started giving us an easier lead in to great partnerships for 2009 and 2010.

Do you think Twitter is the right place for brands?

Absolutely. Brands with something meaningful to say and offer belong on Twitter. I tweet as @Macala and Jen Bernstein is @1928jewelry on Twitter, but the account has her information and she writes it from her perspective. We represent ourselves, not just the company as a blind name. We interact as ourselves, and I think that’s key. Just like Tony Hsieh (@Zappos) does. It’s him, not just a blind thing.

Do you see a revival in women’s fashion toward the more iconic classic look?

Vintage is quite an interesting term, because it means something different to each person. Vintage could be straight Hollywood glamour–sleek glass accents, black, white, silver–highly refined and glamorous, or it can be Breakfast at Tiffany’s, glamorous but more soft and approachable, casual. It can even be the conservative, yet sexy and provocative style of the 1960s that provided simple, everyday elegance. Vintage is on a huge upswing right now because of the economy. Every magazine talks about thrifty finds, dressing on a budget and creating a multi-purpose wardrobes. Women–including your most favorite celebs–are starting to brag about the bargain bin finds at Marshall’s, shopping in consignment stores and antique flea market finds. It’s hip to frugal now, we even have terms for it: Bargainista and Frugalista.

But I don’t think that vintage inspiration has ever left fashion–if you look through five years of Vanity Fair or Vogue, you find vintage-inspired styles on every page. Necklaces, colors, dress cuts, the lines of skirts, they all pay homage to something that was a trend in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50, 60s. It’s beautiful. Strong vintage inspiration is what distinguishes a classic woman from a trendy girl.

Where is the jewelry made? If outsourced, do you have control over your chain to ensure it’s all fair labor?

1928 is made in the US, our main facility is in Burbank, California. We have strict policies on the chain to ensure ethical and fair treatment of our labors.

Where can we get it?

All 1928 Jewelry collections, including Vintage Bridal, can be bought online at 1928.com. The more modern line of 2028 is available at Macy’s or online.

pass it on!
[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [kirtsy] [Ma.gnolia] [Mixx] [Propeller] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Email] More »

Tags: , , , , , , ,
3 Comments Comments



Newer Entries »

  • AV Flox writes about web culture; new media’s gradual overthrow of old media; trends in social media; and the complicated entanglements people get themselves into as we venture forth into this new world where, more and more, the analog is colliding with the digital.

  • Hosted by: