Trend reports are normally based on what’s been shown on the runway. But the prevalence of a certain color or pattern doesn’t necessarily mean people are interested in it. Fashion will always be an industry for visionaries – creative people who push design ideas the mass market didn’t know they wanted until seeing them. That said, fashion shows and presentations are no longer industry only events. They’re part of the marketing mix to reach customers, and through social media the fan, editor, buyer and shopper can all contribute to the data that exposes where interest is highest.

That’s the idea behind our latest special feature on Fashion Week Trends. We crawled photos associated with nearly 200 shows, more than 5400 individual looks, and let the social media data tell the story. View the Top 25 shows from New York Fashion Week, as well as the Top 50 looks. Individual show rankings are available, with look metrics. The NYFW Runway Intel report combines all of the activity for a complete look at the colors, shapes and designers with the most interest.

Besides being of questionable legality, there are a number of common sense problems here.

For one, while BlackBerry may have been the preferred communication device among protesters, news of and plans for riots largely spread to Twitter and more public channels. Public channels that police could easily monitor to determine where outbreaks of violence might occur next, to better coordinate their efforts. Even on BlackBerry’s network, there’s nothing to suggest that police who may have had BlackBery devices themselves were banned or restricted from accessing more open forum posts, or submitting their own numbers to organizers looking to rally as many people as they could.

The most secure BlackBerry messages – ones with end-to-end encryption are typically not even available to users not on the type of enterprise plan normally used by large companies and government. {Deutsch Welle} So if everyone else is sending messages that can be unencrypted by any other BlackBerry device, would it not make more sense to simply buy the police department a few BlackBerry handsets so that they could monitor chatter on the network?

That’s to say nothing of more open networks like Twitter or Facebook, who are also coming under fire.

So instead of oh, say, putting a few tech savvy officers on the networks to create profiles, and monitor and potentially engage people suspected of plotting criminal activity, you instead shut down their profiles, forcing them to move to secondary accounts which are further under the radar, or onto methods that are more difficult to monitor, like in person conversations.

Then you not only have plots that are more difficult to trace, but less evidence to actually prosecute people with as well.

Brilliant.

Say what you will about their ethics, but maybe we should get News Corp. on this – they seem to be the one London organization who can figure out how to monitor a person and gather information. A group of anonymous UK residents (ex-News of the World?) created Zavilia.com, a site that uses Facebook to get photos of rioters, and has crowd sourced identification of people in the pictures. Once multiple IDs come in on the same person, the name is forwarded to police. Some particularly bold rioters are posting photos of themselves with their loot on social networks, sites where they can sell the merchandise and doing other things online that are easily traceable and identifiable. All this to say that if a random developer with a few spare hours can figure out how to use social media to identify and potentially stop looters, fame seeking criminals with more braggadocio than criminal genius are openly posting photos, surely the entire UK government can figure out how to prevent and prosecute crimes with the help of social media, not in spite of it.

While there is a real need to review the plans for dealing with sudden and unexpected outbursts of criminal activity, Mr. Cameron’s anti-social media strategy is unlikely to have any real effectiveness within it. BBMs don’t cause criminal activity, for all the credit they’ve received, neither Twitter or Facebook caused revolutions. They may facilitate the planning, but for both good and bad, killing a communication method doesn’t kill the spirit behind the messages.

According to a post by Christian Oestlien, whose profile lists him as The Google+ Project Ads Guy (ironic), it never occurred to any of the brilliant minds in the Googleplex that brands, businesses, groups or other organizations that are larger than one person would want to participate.

“There may be a tiny handful business profiles that will remain in the meantime solely for the purpose of testing how businesses interact with consumers…The platform at the moment is not built for the business use case, and we want to help you build long-term relationships with your customers. Doing it right is worth the wait. We will continue to disable business profiles using regular profiles. We recommend you find a real person who is willing to represent your organization on Google+ using a real profile as him-or-herself,” says Oestlien.

Really? After the massive success of Facebook pages, it never once occurred to Google that if Google+ was going to offer itself up as an alternative to the dominant social network, a business option might be needed? And the solution is just “find a real person”? We can’t recall a single brand telling users to find them on Facebook and add their marketing manager as a friend.

Not to mention, when Google does open up to the public – which is expected to be much sooner than “a few months,” longterm usage and success will probably hinge on less tech savvy users being able to find and follow their favorite singer, or sports team, or news network, or favorite restaurant or any number of other accounts that really just don’t make sense on a personal profile – no matter how advanced or easy to use filters may be.

Recognizing that, Google reinstated Ford’s account, and made arrangements with Mashable’s Pete Cashmore to have him use the Mashable profile as a personal one. Apparently there’s no love for Big Bird and Elmo, because Sesame Street continues to return a 404. News Stream, a program on CNN International still has a profile, as does the Next Web so we assume they’re two of the arbitrary “tiny handful” of business profiles deemed suitable for testing. Meanwhile, the brands and businesses not deemed important enough to participate – Signature9 included – have been left wondering how something so obvious was overlooked in the first place.

Oh, and it’s pissing off the early adopters who’ve been helping Google+ achieve such rapid growth. Lisa Barone at Outspoken Media offers a summary of why playing favorites after creating a messy game isn’t the best move.

Can we at least convince a graphic design over at Google HQ to slap a beta label on this project?

Awwkward.

The service is still new, and quite obviously skews tech heavy, so once more invites open up we’re sure that Google celeb favorites like Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber who dominate Facebook and Twitter will kick the geeks out of the top 10 on Google+ as well. And really, if Google+ is going to be a Facebook (or Twitter) killer, that will be the surest sign of future potential.

Though having your primary competitor sign up to see what’s going on isn’t a bad sign either.

Looks like “The Social Network” won’t get a sequel any time soon. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and former Harvard classmate Divya Narendra have decided to abandon plans for an appeal to the Supreme Court, after previous attempts to have a 2008 settlement reversed failed.

The judge who heard the case didn’t see it that way and suggested the Winklevosses take the original settlement – worth $65 million – they’d agreed to and move on. After exhaustive appeals poking around for more money (sorry, couldn’t help including that) and a more substantial settlement, they finally have.

The good news  for the twins is that the original settlement seems to be based on stock, and is valued at $200 million now. {Bits/New York Times}

The bad news? Appealing a ruling against an internet giant takes a lot of money, so it wouldn’t be surprising if legal fees ate into most of that.  The Winklevosses aren’t commenting, so no one knows how much of the settlement they can expect to keep.

Facebook, on the other hand, is commenting. In a statement they said “weâ€ve considered this case closed for a long time, and weâ€re pleased to see the other party now agrees.”

Lady Gaga at Twitter headquarters

For a girl whose father was worried about her getting a real job, Lady Gaga’s showing dear old dad there’s no cause for concern. Since reportedly going broke for the early portion of her pop star career, Lady Gaga’s taken on the title of Polaroid creative director, unofficial (and unwanted) ice cream muse, and Farmville promoter among other things. Now you can add tech angel investor to the list. Someone’s going to need a bigger business card.

Skipping the trend of celebrity as online startup entrepreneur, Gaga’s will go straight to online startup investor with a stake in a $1 million investment in online startup Backplane. {Dealbook/New York Times} Lady Gaga (née Stefani Germanotta) won’t be investing alone: the $1 million funding round is being led by Google’s Eric Schmidt, though Gaga will reportedly be a 20% shareholder in the company.

Before you decide to stop working on ways to get your demo tape to Lady Gaga, and start getting your business plan in front of her, you should know that Troy Carter, the entrepreneur behind Backplane, is also Lady Gaga’s business manager. In other words, the man with a large amount of responsibility for Lady Gaga’s overwhelming social media success.

Backplane isn’t publicly available yet, but already has a team of seven and has been cooking since last fall. Carter sees it as a platform for musicians and sports teams to build communities that include Twitter, Facebook and other existing networks. Though the intent is for entertainment, we could easily see brands buying into the platform if it’s effective. Tide may not be as sexy as Lady Gaga, but if Backplane can help make campaigns across social websites and different campaigns easier to manage that’s something that will be as attractive to someone selling soap as someone selling singles.

Not to mention, Carter has one pretty great case study on his hands: Lady Gaga beat out Ashton Kutcher and Justin Bieber to become the first person to reach 10 million Twitter followers; the first person to gain 10 million Facebook fans (now 37 million); and her videos continue to set and blow through all kinds of YouTube records. Her recent promotion with Amazon cost the e-tailer millions, but it also brought enough attention to Amazon’s new music service to crash their servers.

At this point, people online like Lady Gaga more than Coca-Cola, long touted as one of the world’s most valuable brands. While Silicon Valley still isn’t sold on Hollywood players (entertainers) bringing significant value to startups, we wouldn’t bet against the guy behind one of the most valuable online brands in modern pop culture, or the possibility that other brands will want in on the action.

In spite of the fact that Facebook is the number one site for wealthy Internet denizens in several countries, some luxury brands continue to be holdouts when it comes to getting involved with the largest social media site in the world. For those who have decided to be part of modern marketing, rather than hoping it goes away, who’s getting their social strategy right?

L2, the NYU think tank that tracks social media and online efforts among luxury brands, recently published a Facebook IQ report with data from Buddy Media that attempts to answer that question.

The "Genius" brands of L2's Facebook IQ Report

Unsurprising to us, only one fashion brand made the top 10 (well done, Tory Burch). BMW took the top spot, and among the “Genius” level brands, automobile makers in general had a strong showing. While fashion brands are still struggling a bit, spirits & champagne brands had a respectable showing as did beauty brands like Clinique, Bare Escentuals, Benefit and Bobbi Brown. Those brands not only allow fans to post to their pages, most do Genius things like actually responding to create a 2-way conversation as opposed to a broadcast.

Hint: that’s what makes social media different from traditional media. Fortunately Facebook realizes that there are enough brands who will ignore that important differentiator for as long as possible, so in August brand pages will be forced to *gasp* allow their fans to post comments, making social interaction mandatory. That should be fun to watch.

The ranking was based on 4 primary criteria: size and velocity (how large the brand community is, how fast it’s growing); content (types of content, variety, e-commerce integration); engagement (if a brand posts and no one is paying attention…); and integration (no Facebook page should be an island).

All good criteria that help to identify which brand efforts are making the most of Facebook beyond fan counts. It’s not that Burberry’s millions of Facebook fans isn’t impressive: it’s definitely an achievement from a company that’s made online marketing a priority. In a case study in the report though, Tory Burch’s end-to-end integration with “Like” buttons on each product page of their e-commerce site, header and footer links that actively drive people to their Facebook page, and f-commerce Facebook store to complete the circle pushed them further ahead in spite of a fan count that’s a mere 6% of Burberry’s.

We take a similar view of influence: reaching large numbers of people on the web, on a social network or anywhere else is great, but how those people respond is even more telling. It will be interesting to see how upcoming fan page changes that push brands into two-way interaction will affect future rankings, but now is as good a time as any to benchmark the brands already getting things right, and which are luxuriously anti-social.

Download the L2 Facebook IQ report here.

An IT consultant in Pakistan (inadvertently) shared the first piece of information about the raid that led to Osama bin Laden’s death on Twitter, and the first person to announce the event did it through a tweet as well. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism though, Twitter “barely registers” as a referral source to top news sites, while Facebook can often be “the second or third most important driver of traffic.”

This is completely anecdotal, but it seems that Twitter gets a lot more mentions in broadcast journalism, so we have to wonder if some part of this is just down to how news organizations use each site. Keith Urbahn, who tweeted “So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama bin Laden. Hot damn.” an hour before President Obama made the announcement, says he got the tip from a news producer. Most mainstream media outlets didn’t announce their speculations on the content of the President’s announcements for a while longer, but at the time Urbahn tweeted, there was nothing to link to.

In fact, a cursory glance at the Twitter accounts for quite a few journalists show brief updates and replies to followers without links to previous coverage.

Given the size of Facebook, it’s not difficult to believe that they’d be able to send a site more traffic than Twitter (all things being equal), but is Twitter really that much of a non-entity? We’d imagine that some portion of people who see headline grabbing tweets head to news websites or a search engine to confirm the information. It might not show up as a direct referral, but there is some impact. If you’ve ever wondered why “(insert living celebrity name here)  is dead” trends on Twitter first, then on Google’s Hot Searches list, there’s your explanation. When it comes to someone dying for real – bin Laden, for example, it’s difficult to believe there isn’t a similar effect that ultimately leads to more traffic for news sites, even though it’s traffic that’s not directly attributable.

RenRen, a Chinese social network, just had a very successful IPO that raised $743 million for the company on shares priced at $14 (the high end of what many analysts anticipated). Currently, the stock is trading at $16.76 per share, giving the company a valuation of $6.5 billion on revenue of $67.5 million in 2010 – up 64% from 2009 revenues.

There’s certainly value in the network, but we have to go against the many media outlets who’ve promoted RenRen as “the Chinese Facebook.” It’s not.

Fortune notes some of RenRen’s similarities to Facebook: a social network that started by targeting college students before expanding to everyone, members using their real identities to connect with people they know, a platform for app developers, popular social games, a Connect system with partner websites. There are definitely a lot of similarities, but it’s the differences that account for why RenRen =/= Facebook.

1. Facebook is a big deal outside of the US, RenRen is only big in China

And according to their mission statement

“we aim to define social networking experience and to revolutionize the way that people in China connect, communicate, entertain and shop”

(emphasis, ours) they have no ambitions to change that. China is obviously a good market to be number one in, but so is the US. If Facebook had only focused on growth in the US, they wouldn’t be anywhere near where they are today. Facebook is Facebook because they’re the number one social network in the UK, in France, in Germany, in Canada and many more countries. Sure, there are plenty of countries where Facebook isn’t the top social network – notably Brazil, South Korea and Japan.

But as lucrative as the Chinese market is – and it’s certainly lucrative, being number one in one country just doesn’t equal being number one in 20 (sizable) countries.

2. When it comes to active users, there’s not a clear leader in China

RenRen claims 117 million registered users, but of that only 31 million are active. Percentage wise, that’s slightly more than 1/4th of registered users. No social network is immune to abandoned accounts, but worldwide Facebook claims more than 500 million active users, with 50% logging in daily. At an advertising event in February of this year, Facebook’s head of US Agency Relations broke out some country specific numbers. In the US (Facebook’s home country), there are 149 million active American users, 70% of whom log on daily. {TechCrunch}

Since Facebook doesn’t release registered user numbers (at over 500 million active users, it’s kind of  unnecessary) there’s no definitive figure to compare that with, but Google’s ad planning tool estimates put the number of absolute unique US users to Facebook in March 2011 at 190 million. If we assume all of those users have a Facebook account, that would mean almost 80% of Facebook’s US users are active, and 55% of their total registered user base – not just those who are active – visit the site every day.

RenRen’s active user numbers aren’t close. Add to that, even though analysts say competitors like 51.com are declining, they still maintain an equal or higher number of active Chinese internet users. {SAI/BusinessInsider} So RenRen isn’t exactly losing the fight when it comes to Chinese social networks, but there’s a way to go before they’re declared the winner.

3. Facebook is an internet presence outside Facebook

For a while, some people saw Facebook as the new AOL: a walled garden service that would eventually crash as people began to decentralize and move to sites on the open web. Then Facebook released widgets that allowed for the easy addition of Facebook social features to almost any site on the open web. Almost overnight, it made Facebook a force beyond Facebook.

The ‘Like’ button is officially a year old as of April 21st, and 10,000 sites are using it. RenRen Connect, which launched in October 2009, has 600 partner sites.

It’s not an apples to apples comparison, but probably one of the clearer examples of why our first two points matter.

4. User growth is beginning to plateau

RenRen is still growing, but percentage wise, user and revenue growth is slowing. {BusinessInsider} Facebook’s overall percentage growth may not be as rapid as it was in the past few years, but that’s because it’s pretty hard to keep up 100% year over year growth in every market when you have 500 million active users.

5. There is no RenRen ecosystem

Part of the reason Facebook has been able to raise so much money at eye-popping valuations is the fact that it’s an ecosystem that has the power to not only create revenue for itself, but cottage industries as well. Sure, Facebook owes some of its popularity to companies like Zynga, who create games and apps that keep people on the site; but Zynga also owes a good part of its multi-million dollar value to Facebook. Then there are companies like NorthSocial and BuddyMedia, who provide brands and companies with tools that help them manage their presence on the site.

Even Twitter, who still hasn’t completely figured out how to capitalize on the value it’s creating, has managed to create an ecosystem that other companies can be built on.

While Chinese game developers have had hits, RenRen just isn’t in a position yet to create industries specifically around RenRen.

While it’s highly unlikely that RenRen will ever equal the success of Facebook, it doesn’t have to to be successful. As of April 2010, ComScore estimates that 38% of Chinese internet users visit social networking sites, compared to 81% of US internet users. That means there’s still plenty of room for growth in users and revenue to satisfy investors. Add to that the fact that it’s notoriously difficult for Western consumer tech companies to succeed in China without partnerships, and RenRen certainly has a chance at becoming a significant Chinese internet company. Just don’t compare it to Facebook.

T-Mobile has launched Bobsled, a Facebook app that allows users to make VOIP calls to friends through Facebook chat and leave public or private Facebook voice messages.{T-Mobile blog}

“Bobsled by T-Mobile is a new brand aimed at bridging the world of traditional telecommunications with Internet-based voice and data services. This application for Facebook is the first product available under the new Bobsledâ„¢ by T-Mobile brand. As the way people communicate transcends networks and devices, Bobsled by T-Mobile positions T-Mobile as a provider of cloud-based communications services over the Internet.”

If anyone remembers what happened to all of the good brand equity Cingular had when it was acquired by AT&T (hint: they killed the brand off in favor of the not so favored AT&T brand), this seems to be a curious time for T-Mobile to launch a new brand. Pushing the Bobsled brand will make it easier for AT&T to step in and take over, but with their history there doesn’t seem to be any guarantee that AT&T will keep it.

Let’s say that even after the acquisition, AT&T gets this right. Establishing a separate brand for something that’s aiming to replicate a startup’s success is a smart move, but allowing it some of the freedom that allows startups to grow is another thing. If the deal goes through, there will certainly be plenty of money to support Bobsled, but there may also be a big corporate bureaucracy to follow that kills off any chance it has of establishing marketshare when a company like, oh say… Skype, introduces an app with similar functionality.

There are plans in the “near future” to include video chat, VOIP calls to landline and mobile numbers in the US, and carrier agnostic smartphone apps that bring those features to mobile devices.

We do like the fact that T-Mobile is being vocal about their plans. With any hope, during the massive regulatory investigation which is sure to come before the T-Mobile/AT&T deal can go through the Department of Justice will include requirements similar to those it imposed on the Google/ITA deal that ensure the project isn’t starved of funding or attention and abandoned before it gets a chance to succeed.

Bobsled by T-Mobile can be downloaded here.