Earlier this year, Burberry's chief creative officer Christopher Bailey said that "Burberry is now as much a media-content company as we are a design company", and it seems that Bailey is staying true to his word.
At their London Fashion Week runway show, Burberry staged a 'Tweetwalk' in which instant backstage 'Twitpics' were shared on Twitter before the models hit the catwalk. The move created an enormous amount of traffic on Burberry's Twitter page, catapaulting both '#Burberry' and 'Christopher Bailey' into the social media site's worldwide 'Trending' list. Not only was the label's mentions-per-minute record smashed, the backstage images received more than 50,000 views within half an hour of the show.
Burberry has over half a million Twitter followers and an astronomical 8.5 million Facebook 'likes', however the online takeover was not popular with everyone. While Bailey said that he "gets excited about using all of those [online] platforms to communicate to all of our different communities around the world about what we're doing," other 'Tweeters' were in uproar about the congestion that the 'Tweetwalk' caused.
One well-known blogger slammed the brand for their 'takeover' of Twitter, pointing out that the site is about encouraging "a conversation…its not a broadcast," however Bailey explained to Mashable that "digital communication and technology are part of the way everybody lives. We're a 155-year-old company, but a very young team. It would almost be weird if we didn't do it".
With a Twitter takeover, more Facebook likes than Jesus Christ and a 3D holographic runway under their belt, we must ask ourselves, what's next for Burberry and their media invasion?
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