Anna Dello Russo has worked with H&M, the Sartorialist's Scott Schuman has written his second book and home-grown Susie Bubble has consulted for Gap, Armani and Selfridges to name a few. There is no doubt that these figures are key influencers in the world of fashion and they are turning their efforts and knowledge into fiscal benefits. Fashion blogs have become not only a form of user-generated content, a medium for communicating to the masses without any prior training or knowledge, but have also evolved to become a new marketing communications channel in their own right. Fashion writers are not only dictating content to esteemed fashion titles that were once only contributed to by the fashion journalist elite, but they are engaged as brand consultants with the aim of shaping the future direction of brands in terms of content, style and scope. When did all this power and influence happen and how can we measure it? This is the central question inherent to this study’s focus.

The dynamic nature of digital, online and social media activities means that most research is out of date or getting closer to ‘expiry’ even as the ink dries on the page. To exemplify: research dated just three years ago still includes MySpace in a comprehensive list of online networks and social media sites (e.g. Mir and Zaheer, 2012) and ‘second life’ as an innovation [albeit this has been experiencing somewhat of a renaissance within certain consumer sectors in recent times]. This aside, the point is thus: academic scholarship cannot keep up with the rapid rate of digital change in the landscape, but it continues to try, as does this humble study.

A volume of research has recently contributed to the understanding of the influence of social media in the fashion sphere, predominately from an electronic word-of-mouth (e-wom) perspective, for example (Bronner and Hoog, 2013; Fang, 2014; Hennig-Thurau, 2004; Kulmala et al., 2013; Liu, 2006; Trusov et al., 2009) engagement with social media (e.g. Campbell et al, 2012; Dhaoui, 2014). This body of literature has supplied a solid foundation for understanding why user-generated content may be shared and under what circumstances and to whom. However, a limitation of these significant contributions are reasons for propensity to influence, that is, once it has been shared, distributed and circulated, how do we measure the impact of this influence? Yes we can use analytics to quickly demonstrate quantitative and numerical impact in terms of followers, traffic, interaction, sales and (not so quickly) the wider reach of blogs on PR for brands, brand-metrics and customer engagement. But what about the wider influential impact of key social media writers and opinion leaders, or those that follow and listen to them: how can we evaluate this impact of influence? How does it work? Why does it work with some over others?
We seek to find answers around this notion of social influence and ask: why do people listen to bloggers? Do consumers of this information distinguish between platforms: do they prefer blogs? Twitter? Picture-content through Instagram or Pinterest? Is there a gender difference? Considering also the rise in ‘erasable’ social media in the form of SnapChat, which lasts ten seconds before ‘self destructing’: what impact are these having in terms of influence in particular sectors like fashion, how can brands harness this power and use it to build equity, target new consumers, increase sales and revenue? In other geographical domains, such as China, where social media constraints and censorship are notable, emerging applications like WeChat are increasing in popularity, first with consumers, but retail and fashion brands are also beginning to endorse them to facilitate a meaningful conversation with their customers through these innovations.

We also aim to explore the current state of play regarding terminology for social media contributors – are they still bloggers even though they create content across-platform? (It would be unusual for example, for a popular and credible blogger to only have a blog and no twitter or Instagram activity). Is the term blogger naturally all-encompassing or is it a misnomer that we need to create new terminology to explain these phenomena? Cullen (2014) the fashion magazine editor of Elle Australia created a blogger award ceremony to honour the contribution of these fashion influencers and comments that:

“We picked the ones that we felt have the most traction with our readers. It is very clear we are in a blogger boom right now and everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon and [the nominees] gave fashion this new relevance. They took fashion and democratized it, so rather than have to see what the designer wanted you to see [on the catwalk], they took the runway fashion and put it together in their own ways. They made it wearable, as they mixed it with other labels and all those things that make an outfit work for real life.”

This quote serves to illuminate an example of the commercial impact of fashion bloggers in the fashion sector and the relevance that influential opinion leaders believe they can have on their readership. Thus, we seek, through our research, to interrogate existing literature on social media, marketing, consumption and consumer psychological theories in the context of fashion influence with the aim of contributing to understanding in this fast-evolving transformative sector.

Social media has been defined as:
‘A group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content. (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010, .61).
Within this context, social media applications exist to facilitate user interaction, and include blogs, content communities, discussion boards and chat rooms, product and/or service review sites, virtual worlds, and social networking sites (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010; Mangold and Faulds, 2009). In this paper we focus on social networking, which refers to applications, such as Facebook and Twitter, Instagram/Pinterest and more disposable aps like Snapchat. Essentially, we take an all-embracing approach to understanding social media, as this is simply how it is used by consumers, in the virtual landscape (for example, users do not distinguish between platforms, they simply use the most appropriate means to communicate their content at that time).

We aim to contribute a perspective that is original by investigating existing literature in two territories: social media influence and Social Impact Theory, which we will use as a theoretical perspective to explore the influence of social media on fashion.

A Theoretical Lens: Social Influence Theory (SIT)
After dismissing other theoretical frameworks for our study’s focus including: Uses and Gratifications theory; Involvement and Motivation, the choice to focus on Social Impact Theory (SIT) (Latane, 1981) was rationalized by the centrality of influence as a construct, to the characteristics of the theory. SIT (Latane, 1981) maintains, “as the number of people increases the impact on the target individual’s attitude and behavior enhances”. As influence is inherent to our aim, this theory, albeit being created almost two decades before the concept of social media, may have transferable qualities that may aid comprehension of understanding into the complexities associated with understanding the influence of social media in the fashion sector. This seemingly large leap from a traditional application of the theory to the virtual world is made more plausible by at least one previous study, that has started to also recognize the value of this framework for understanding online activity for example, Mir and Zaheer (2012) who use SIT in the contexts of social media and banking. The theory has not however, been used thus far in the realm of fashion and social media, thus, a study of this kind aims to contribute to knowledge in this field.
Social impact has been defined by the founding father of the theory as:

‘Any of the great variety of changes in physiological states and subjective feelings, motives and emotions, cognitions and beliefs, values and behavior, that occur in an individual, human, or animal, as a result of the real, implied or imagined presence or actions of other individuals’. (Latané, 1981, p. 343)

Latané (1981) created social impact theory to validate his hypothesis about how influence works, which led to the identification of three factors that make up social impact theory: 1) Strength: How important is the influencing group to the target of the influence; 2) Immediacy: How close in proximity and in time is the influencing group to the target of the influence; 3) Number: How many people are in the influencing group. Taking each one of these in turn, the leverage of these variables to a social media context seems obvious. Social media by its very nature encourages a ‘pull’ approach to groups or communities (hence the ‘strength’ variable); the ‘immediacy’ of social media in the sense that messages can be communicated and responded to in real time, have been facilitated by social media capabilities. Finally, the third variable of SIT is ‘number’; in a virtual world, there is a real sense that there is no limit to the amount of people you can communicate with. To exemplify, we refer to Facebook with its 9 Billion plus users as an example of this reach, or Lady GaGa with her 44 Million plus followers on Twitter.

This succinct insight into SIT theory provides a short rationale as to its applicability to a social media context, specifically the fashion sector. A more in-depth analysis of its use and application to this study will be developed for the final paper following data collection.

• Kate Armstrong(University of Greenwich)
• Eva Schwarz(London College of Fashion)
• Marta Blazquez(University of Manchester)
• Matteo Montecchi(London College of Fashion)