FashionCamp Vienna, luxury brand, Fashion Week, metrics, ranking, ratings,

Next Update: February / March 2014

Crowdsourcing – see what the cat drags in

One way to find out which bloggers are popular with your clients is to run a contest, like Neiman Marcus did. Each finalist was promised a US$1,000 gift card and their portraits were posted for voting on NeimanMarcus.com and Cusp.com. The grand prize offered was a US$2,500 gift card, allowing the crowd to decide who wins.

Another approach is to ask readers to submit names (again a crowdsourcing approach) and then let the editors choose and decide. This is what Marie Claire UK did for its inaugural award in 2012 (good luck finding out who won in 2013…).

Create your own list

Many people create their own list, which can be refreshing. For instance, fashion journalists have tried to come up with London’s best: fashion blogs, a personal list in which the journalist clearly explains her choices.

Cision tries another approach, and publishes, Fashion blogs UK: Top 20. Unfortunately, this list neither gives us the criteria that was used nor does it provide reasoning behind how the potentially subjective list was chosen.

CyTRAP BlogRank – top 50 list

The CyTRAP BlogRank is an algorithm that assigns a numerical weight to each blog post, in order to obtain the score, which ranges from 0 (worst) through 100 (best).

CyTRAP BlogRank is calculated using SIX indices: Headline Score, Text Complexity Score, First Impressions Score, Knowledge Transfer Score, Online Word of Mouth Marketing (OnWOMma), which is made up of the Ripple Score (LinkedIn, Twitter und Facebook), and the Engagement/Social Interaction Score.

Who was included and why?

We went ahead and used all the lists mentioned above and included these blogs in our list. In other words, we deferred to the experts from fashion magazines, designers, afficionados and many more to get a list of blogs for the UK.

Just for (very useful) fun, we also asked the algorithm to group these blogs. The CyTRAP BlogRank helps you improve your Google PageRank, and target visitor traffic by focusing attention on engagement (e.g., reader comments), and social sharing (i.e. what gets shared on which social network).

Arieta Mujay is in charge of UK public relations for fashion brand River Island. Her suggestion is to engage with readers, be personal (e.g., writing style and Text Complexity Score), and come across as a professional with your blog posts (First Impressions Score; as outlined in The Blog Works II).

Conclusion – The winners are

Here is our list based on the numbers – 2013-08-31 – congratulations, and our hats off to you!

Update 2013-09-03: Thanks to @fashionknitsa for correction regarding atlantic-pacific.blogspot.com – a US fashion blog from @BlairEadieBEE (now on the US list).

Find the COMPLETE list here: CyTRAP BlogRank: 50 best UK fashion blogs 2013

How does a fashion brand decide which blog to sponsor?

Some have argued that trust remains an issue, because brands are still wary of the raft of inexperienced bloggers posting about their Spring line up. Such content is, however, easily accessible, and while it may be in the raw and rough, bloggers can be quite successful by getting great resonance with their content among their loyal followers.

Brands should track the blogs they sponsor. This way, monitoring provides helpful feedback for the sponsor and the blogger on improving content to better engage and resonate with the target audience – customers. How a certain type of headline affects sharing of the blogger’s story about New York Fashion Week on Facebook matters to the brand and blogger alike. Systematic monitoring using CyTRAP BlogRank helps, so talk to us!

More resources about FASHION blogs, etc.

– Google to the rescue – search and find – fashion, metrics, ranking, blogs,
– Register for FashionCamp Vienna 2013
– How to write a great headline

Source: Top 50 UK fashion blogs

I look forward to your thoughts and comments below.

Did I miss YOUR blog? Please feel free to add your URL below.

The author: This post was written by social media marketing and strategy expert Urs E. Gattiker, who also writes about issues that connect social media with compliance, and thrives on the challenge of measuring how it all affects your bottom line.

His latest book, Social Media Audit: Measure for Impact, appeared in November 2012 (Springer Science Publishers), and he is currently hard at work on the next one.

Connect with ComMetrics on Google+ or the author using: Email | Twitter | Google+ | Xing

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Tagged as: benchmark, best practice, blog metrics, brand, couture, fashion, fashion blogger, fashion business, fashion magazine, fashion style, Fashion Week, FashionCamp Vienna, luxury, media marketing, street style

Jake O’Neill

Hi Urs

Thanks for mentioning Cision’s Top 20 UK Fashion Blogs. As i’m sure you’ll appreciate, we don’t share the precise details of our influencer algorithm but the factors used to rank the content are included in the text (under the ranking) on each social media index post.

We always invite anyone seeking further information to contact our researchers directly; their email addresses can be found at the bottom of posts. If you’d like to carry on this discussion, feel free to get in touch.

Thanks again

Jake O’Neill
Editorial Coordinator, Cision UK
- http://blogrank.cytrap.eu/ig/4yt/*/*/*/CEO/top100 Urs E. Gattiker
  
  Dear @MediaJake:twitter
  
  Thanks so much for your comment above which I truly appreciate.
  You write:
  “As i’m sure you’ll appreciate, we don’t share the precise details of our influencer algorithm but the factors used to rank the content are included in the text (under the ranking) on each social media index post.”
  
  I am not sure if I appreciate it because what you state on the page is as follows:
  “Cision’s blog ranking methodology takes into consideration social sharing, topic-related content and post frequency.”
  
  The above does not really tell me how these things work together. For instance, how does post frequency come into play, does it mean more posts is better? Is it?
  
  Maybe I am old fashioned. However, in this case I fail to comprehend how frequency of posts or topic-related content affect the ranking of one blog.
  
  Do you have anything more on your webpage explaining this? Thanks for sharing.
  Urs @ComMetrics:twitter
  - Jake O’Neill
    
    Hi Urs
    
    Thanks for your reply. For us, and our concept of influence, frequent posting is important. As is topic-related content; a lot of blogs cover a variety of topics and so to include them on a fashion blog ranking, and to say ‘This blog is influential in the fashion blogosphere’, requires them to have a certain level of fashion-specific content.
    
    Our rankings are used by a large number of PR professionals and brands in their collaboration decisions, and as such are quite a valuable resource. We don’t want it to be replicated easily, hence the deep-level secrecy.
    
    I hope that makes sense.
    - http://blogrank.cytrap.eu/ig/4yt/*/*/*/CEO/top100 Urs E. Gattiker
      
      Dear @mediajake:twitter
      
      Thanks for your reply. Can I infer from your reply above that you have no more information available online about your measurement approach?
      
      Nevertheless, your explanations above clarify two things for me very well about the influence measurement process Cision uses , namely:
      1 – Cision’s concept of influence is in part made up of frequency of posting
      PS. It seems as if you imply the more frequently one posts, the higher the blog’s influence; and
      2 – a certain level of blog content must be about fashion to make you include the blog in your fashion rankings.
      
      This still leaves open, if your methodology does in fact manage to measure influence.
      Certainly, this is a difficult concept to define… and even worse, operationalising the concept in order to measure it is not easy.
      
      As a scientist, I am used to my research findings including methodology being open to my peers’ assessment. This enables my colleagues to replicate my work.
      But I do understand that CISION does not abide to this philosophy. We have and continue to follow this mantra with CyTRAP BlogRank. Of course I respect your approach and admire you for getting your clients to accept it.
    - Jake O’Neill
      
      Hi Urs
      
      Our publicly available rankings are a by-product; the
      influencer scores have been developed (and we continue to develop them!) for PRs using our CisionPoint software. I appreciate that as an academic the process of peer review is very important, but as our motivations are commercial,
      we must keep our methodology secret so no competitors may replicate it.
      
      Becoming established and trusted for our rankings has taken a number of years, with key rankings – such as the Top 20 UK Fashion Blogs – being
      updated multiple times. As our target audience is predominantly PR professionals, our concept of influence revolves around their aims and may not
      be a universal truth for other professionals/academics.
      
      I can confirm that a high frequency of relevant content is one aspect of inclusion in our blog ranking. But, for the reasons outlined above, I’m afraid I cannot further divulge to what extent it is taken into
      consideration or the intricacies of other criteria.
      
      I’m sorry not to be able to answer all your queries, but
      hope you understand the reasoning behind my response.
      
      Thanks
      
      Jake.
    - http://blogrank.cytrap.eu/ig/4yt/*/*/*/CEO/top100 Urs E. Gattiker
      
      Dear Jake ( @mediaJake:twitter at @CisionUK:twitter )
      
      Again I really appreciate you taking the time to answer my queries.
      
      It looks as if concerns regarding competitiveness prevent you from publishing more insights about how you define influence and, most importantly, measure it (see your statements made above)
      
      I appreciate that. I am glad though that I can say that we publish what we use and how we go about it. No secret. But, maybe different to your system, it is a bit complex to duplicate what we do. Of course, anything can be duplicated as long as one has the resources and is willing to invest (called innovation – happens to all of us).
      
      In your situation, however, if one where interested one could just create one’s own influence measure. All it takes is to be more convincing than Cision. Of course, that is a hard act to follow!
      Nevertheless, this is what marketing is all about Convincing customers and gaining their trust that your tool works.
      
      Merci for this discourse, Jake.
      Urs
      @CyTRAP #BlogRank
Tina Boomerina

Can I be on the top of the list for snarky bitchy boomer fashion sites in the US…. or the UK? My site is Boomerinas.com and I’m so far out of your demographics that you should make me happy and say, “Yes.”
- http://blogrank.cytrap.eu/ig/4yt/*/*/*/CEO/top100 Urs E. Gattiker
  
  Tina
  
  Thanks so much for this comment. I gladly add your site but please tell me if it is a US, UK site
  
  If US pls. leave a comment here:
  
  Top 50 US fashion blogs- just click on text to be connected
  
  Thanks so much for telling me about your site.
Sabine

I’m a blogger over 50 from Germany and I send you many greetings.

Bling
Bling Over 50
- http://blogrank.cytrap.eu/ig/4yt/*/*/*/CEO/top100 Urs E. Gattiker
  
  Liebe @6af40caa8286b3c7d675ad689e71c3f8:disqus
  
  Thanks for leaving this information.
  
  You can then find the benchmark data here in a day or so:
  CyTRAP BlogRank – für den Bling Bling Blog – super (Click für Daten)
  
  I hope this is useful for you @Sabine_Gimm:twitter and if you have a colleague who may want to enter his or her blog, one can do right here:
  
  ==> I entered your blog here: ===> http://blogrank.cytrap.eu/php/suggest.php
  
  Thanks again for sharing, Sabine.
  Urs E. Gattiker

Top 50 UK fashion blogs

See also: