If you think twittering is for the birds, think again. Twitter is the latest rage in free social networking, and it's utilized by everyone from celebs like Oprah Winfrey to CEOs and corporations like CNN. Even American Salon is on the microblogging service that lets users stay connected in real time (about 4 million Americans visit the site monthly). Messages are called "tweets," and unlike e-mails, they can't be any longer than 140 characters. What we've discovered is that salons and spas are using Twitter to network with potential clients, alerting the public to appointments available that day or new products that just came in. Each time you tweet, you attract "followers." As this issue went to press, American Salon (twitter.com/americansalon) had hundreds of followers, mostly salons and spas, beauty companies, stylists and makeup artists.
 Brett Vinovich |
Now there's an ad network called Magpie—think of it as a pay-per-tweet service—that enables advertisers to pay people to endorse their products on Twitter. It's a brave new world, and with new technology, there's more than one way to get your message out there.
 American Salon has hundreds of followers on Twitter. |
American Salon, for example, is accepting ads on its blog, blog.americansalonmag.com. Blogging is a publishing tool that functions like a Web site—the word "blog" is a contraction of the term "weblog"—and can include everything from running commentary to graphics and videos. We're posting daily updates on everything from events, like IBS New York, to new products to breaking industry news. Guest bloggers Sam Villa, Eva Scrivo, Napoleon Perdis, Jane Iredale and celebrity stylist David Evangelista are already contributing to our blog. The blog also provides a link to our Web site.
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Recently, we began publishing an e-newsletter, The Wire, that's sent out every two weeks to tell our subscribers about what's happening on our blog. Advertisers can sponsor the newsletter, which reaches about 20,000 American Salon subscribers at the moment. The advantage? Your message goes right to their inbox.
My former boss, Andy Warhol, would have loved social networking. "I'm the type who'd be happy not going anywhere as long as I was sure I knew exactly what was happening at the places I wasn't going to," he once said. "I'm the type who'd like to sit at home and watch every party that I'm invited to on a monitor in my bedroom." Today, with sites like YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, he could do just that. —Brett Vinovich, publisher, [email protected]