Marina Maher Communications

Tonight, Cosmetic Executive Women hosted their first event of 2011 focused on Digital Beauty.  Thought leaders in digital marketing from mark. (Annemarie Frank, Director of e-Commerce, Digital Media & Strategic Alliances), Estee Lauder (Marisa Thalberg, Vice President of Global Digital Marketing) and Maybelline New York – Garnier (Kristen Yraola, AVP of Digital Media and Internet) shared their tips on reaching female consumers online with the beauty information they seek and crave.  A lot of ground was covered in a short amount time with topics such as digital strategy, changing online landscape, search engine technology, mobile, augmented reality and more!

As marketers are continuously challenged with staying current on emerging technologies and new social media applications, I found the panel’s tips on how to become, and stay, digitally savvy the most helpful. Rather than list a laundry list of websites and social networking tools, they pointed out the qualities we all possess that must be activated within in order to be successful in the digital space.

• Curiosity
  • You must be innately curious to be a good digital marketer. The desire to play, tinker and experiment with the latest tools combined with the yearning to read all the latest trends and thought leadership pieces is what will catapult you ahead of your peers.

• Passion
  • Being passionate for identifying knowledge about people and cultural anthropology is more important than you realize when developing strategy for connecting consumers online and figuring out what will make people act.

• Judgment
  • Given how vast the ever changing online space is, a keen sense of how to filter information (along with corresponding decision making skills) will provide a roadmap for identifying what content is most important while you navigate the rate at which best practices and case studies change.

• Resourcefulness
  • Seeking out experts, education and answers to your digital questions are imperative.  If you aren’t active online every day looking for tutorials or Googling the latest application trending in blogosphere, you will fall behind. (Using Twitter as a learning tool and reading Mashable daily were two hands-on tips shared.)

Industry Insiders, including Mashable, are already talking about New York Fashion Week, and Tumblr (a Social sharing site) is giving us a great way to stay up-to-date given the enormous amount of coverage we typically see from the tents.

This year Tumblr  is sponsoring approximately 20 fashion-specific online influencers at New York Fashion Week, many of whom have never attended Fashion Weeks in the past.   The goal of this initiative is to help build awareness of the fashion community on Tumblr, and to give the Fashion Industry a peek at these up-and-coming talents.

A steady stream of content will be posted to Tumblr.com/nyfw.  Seems like a great way to build alliances with up-and-coming talent that are extremely eager to get to Fashion Week.  We’re sure that these influencers will promote Tumblr in their posts and disclosure statements and help the platform get additional exposure with a new (huge!) target.