Recently, I’ve seen a lot of talk from social media expert-types and novices alike, arguing that the number of Twitter followers you have or Facebook fans you have doesn’t matter. It’s all about the quality of the followers and how engaged you are with them, they say. While I’d be the 1st person to agree with the importance of building a highly engaged, well-targeted community across social networks, quantity matters too.

Numbers count, a lot.

The main reason that both quality and quantity of followers matters is that quality alone doesn’t scale. No large organization on the planet or employee of a large organization can claim that a highly engaged, high quality,small social network community is anywhere near as valuable as a highly engaged, high quality large social network community. Can you?

Two months ago I launched a challenge to my entire staff: Demonstrate your thought leadership. Grow your follower count on Twitter as much as possible.

Use Twitter’s new ad products Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets and see what you can do. I awarded prizes to the top 5 in number of followers gained. Of the 28 individuals in the competition, everyone gained at least 200 followers. Two people each gained over 4,000 followers. They also gained lots of insight. Here are a few of my staffs’ thoughts about gaining followers, quantity vs quantity, & thought leadership on Twitter:

BM: Don’t be afraid to take risks. Engage with everyone who seeks you out. You never know where the #GameChanger is going to come from!

AK: You are your own brand, so promote yourself creatively. Utilize the resources you have, both on Twitter and off. Think outside the box.

JL: Anyone who provides valuable, relevant content and has an outlet for getting it out there can be a thought leader. You get what you give.

AH: There are a lot of crazy Beiber fans on Twitter!…oh & be yourself, converse, share, RT & people will want to follow you!

DN: Quality of followers that will actually engage with your brand is more important than the number of followers.

We got lots of great feedback on this competition for our staff, clients, and community. But we also got negative feedback from the competition, and from a similar Twitter follower competition we host for interns.  One social media strategist, wrote of the competition, “They’ve demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of social strategy from the CEO down and they’re one of the many vendors and social media “agencies” giving other social media professionals a bad rep.”

Sheesh. Onward…

It seems to me that as important as engagement and quality of followers is, if you’re going to use social media to drive business results, you need a lot of followers as well. Here are four examples of relatively high Twitter follower accounts across different use cases driving real business impact:

1) Dell: @DellOutlet’s over 1 million followers led directly to over $6.5 million in sales.

2) Jet Blue: @JetBlueCheeps has over 230,000 followers and have used the account to generate thousands of flash sales.

3) Ashton Kutcher: He has used his over 6 million followers to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for several causes.

4) Likeable Book: On a much smaller but not inconsequential note, we amassed 1800 followers on Twitter in just 6 weeks, part of the reason we launched a New York Times bestseller.

According to Google, there are over 2.4 million “social media experts” out there. Unfortunately, too many of them are either preaching “it’s all about quality” OR “it’s all about quantity.”  I say the numbers do matter. Both quality AND quantity matter on Twitter and in social media. Want to increase your number of Twitter followers? Look here

That beautiful metaphor seems appropriate for the Chanel couture show, which was dense with subtle and exquisite embellishment and took flight on another kind of wings: those of an airplane, a shell built inside the Grand Palais to serve as the show’s venue.

Getting on board was the usual lengthy airport trek. But once seated, the stylish drinks trolley reminded the fashion travelers that this was no ordinary airplane ride — even if the models were all in blue, like an open sky.

Trim and elegant as fantasy air hostesses, the first models were sent out by Karl Lagerfeld, who appeared in front of a mock cockpit at the end to take his bow.

The chic severity of the short dresses, which were suffused in couture details and quintessentially Chanel, was offset by hairstyles that looked like they had been caught in an engine tailspin. A single curving pad by the cheek made the most glamorous of earplugs.

“It’s my blue period,” joked Mr. Lagerfeld, who explained that his cat’s eyes had set him on this path to the runway.

The blue spread in all directions: downward as sapphire baubles dangled from the ears, while skirts fell to ankle length under elongated jackets. Sleeves blew up at the shoulders, as light and vaporous as clouds, but strips of fabric anchored the stand-away necklines.

Every way the audience’s eyes turned found another couture detail, from the house’s signature camellia, in blue shading from cornflower to violet, to crystal beads glinting on hose under lacy, above-the-knee dresses. The embroidery was so subtle and delicate that it would have taken a magnifying class to examine its complexity.

Mr. Lagerfeld’s blue-sky thinking made an elegant collection, filled with tailored clothes that seemed appropriate to straightened times and with evening looks that were light and pretty. But the unexpectedly faithful attachment to Coco’s legacy was perhaps too close this season, for the collection never broke through to that outer-space fashion realm of the imagination that Mr Lagerfeld can reach.

Rare craftsmanship is the foundation of haute couture at Givenchy , especially since the designer Riccardo Tisci has developed a mode of presenting his collection — 10 intensely worked looks — in three rooms of a Parisian hôtel particulier.

Up close, a supple dress, sinuous and seductive with its reptilian surface, turned out to be made from crocodile, but with each scale painstakingly cut out, washed and then sewn back on semitransparent tulle: a mere 350 hours of workmanship.

“After seven years at Givenchy, I have learned a lot — it is like a journey,” Mr. Tisci said.

The collection was a meticulous work out of imagination with craft.

Its starting point was the graphic images of “Metropolis,” the 1927 Fritz Lang film. Deeper research led Mr. Tisci to the 1924 Russian movie “Aelita: Queen of Mars,” with its soundtrack supposedly an inspiration for 1970s techno music.

The 1920s era inspired various ideas: the era of sparkling, speakeasy glamour, interpreted as a dress with layers of twinkling fringe, slung on a thick chain over a tank top. The linear, constructivist workwear included a pair of black pants worn with a sparkle blouse and a glitter of necklace, earrings and nose rings.

Givenchy couture gets to the essence of rigorous, intensive craft within a streamlined shape and a one-on-one relationship with clients who can make Mr. Tisci’s image their own.

At Armani Privé , the saturation of a single color was again the message. But this time it was all green — a mix of those risqué drinks of chartreuse and absinthe, as well as the algaed depths of a pool where aquatic reptiles bathe.

It gave an eerie effect to a simple-seeming show, where the texture of crocodile, mesh, and faint scale patterns made the neat fitted jackets and slim skirts, awkwardly wrapped at the front, seem relatively simple. There were shiny, slim pants as an alternative.

But the forte of Giorgio Armani in this Privé collection is its relationship to the red carpet.

By luck or judgment, the designer had front row the young auburn-haired actress Jessica Chastain, who received the news of her Oscar nomination for her role in “The Help” just before the show started.

“I am so excited. I am trying not to cry,” Ms. Chastain said as she received a bouquet of white roses from Mr. Armani backstage. His other gift to her — or any other stylish nominee — were dresses where reptilian patterns were wrapped in sensual folds below a slender and simple bustier top.

All the Privé evening offerings hit that delicate spot between poufy dressing up and a modern attitude for an energetic woman of today.

“It’s the ABC of couture,” announced Giambattista Valli before sending out a collection of concoctions that seemed to absorb every kind of cut, couture skill and rich embellishment — yet without weighing down the overall look for his young clients.

The show started and ended with a cape, dense with three-dimensional flowers. But a more typical look was crusty guipure lace, re-embroidered with what the designer called “macramé” flowers. There was nothing to suggest that they had been made by loving hands on a hippie trail, for all the decoration was at the summit of sophistication and the favored black and white combination embraced caviar-sized jet beading or a molded top with a peplum over a slim lace skirt.

Mr. Valli was accepted this season into the official ranks of French haute couture. He celebrated it with a show at the Hôtel de Crillon. A trio of grand ball gowns with bold roses and hydrangea prints were symbolic of a designer who is in full flower.

“It started with a scent,” Alexandre Vauthier said backstage to describe his inspiration from Estée Lauder’s “Youth Dew” fragrance: literally, the drape, shape and gilded lines of the bottle and packaging; but also the new fragrance’s context in 1950s New York, when the Waldorf Astoria was the center of society.

From that, the designer drew a fine collection that opened with an immaculately draped white tunic over slim pants, a gilt metallic torque at the neck.

The show went on to caress the shapely waist of the original Youth Dew bottle. But there was nothing of that era in black dresses that fell loose over the bosom, or in slender outfits in the fragrance’s signature pale turquoise or a pastel lavender.

Number 89 in the Internet Retailer’s Top 500 Best ecommerce sites, Net-a-Porter will debut a new microsite and two collections from the one and only Karl Lagerfeld.

Lagerfeld is better known as the creative director for fragrance and apparel brands for Chanel and Fendi. The new microsite on Net-A-Porter.com will feature two brands: Karl – apparel and accessories priced from $85 to $400; and Karl Lagerfeld Paris, a line of apparel and related merchandise ranging form $400 to $2000. The arrangement with Lagerfeld is an opportunity for Net-A-Porter to bring more designer brand to its current range of more than 300 products from different designers.  To generate interest in its new line of apparel they have designed and released a mobile app called “Where’s Karl?”.

The app lets users receive news and other content from the Lagerfeld collections.  Users can also stand chances to win a $1000 shopping spree.  Net-A-Porter uses a glossy fashion magazine to sell men’s and women’s apparel and related merchandise online.

This association with Lagerfeld will surely cause waves in the online fashion world! Every woman wants a taste of this fashion label.

Women’s wardrobes would be oh-so-cumbersome, not to mention boring, without the contributions of the great Parisian designer Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel.

Chanel gave us the little black dress, gaudy layers of pearls, and the fitted tweed suit. Most important, she popularized predecessor Paul Poiret’s early-1900s frocks that featured straighter silhouettes and shorter hemlines. These boyish pieces ultimately helped women do away with the corset.

That’s common fashionista knowledge.

But there’s much more that hasn’t been common knowledge about the bobbed, early-20th-century businesswoman, and it should make for a book chock-full of scandals and affairs. Hence, British author Lisa Chaney’s 400-plus-page tome, Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life.

In the book, Chaney pieces together lost letters and records, which the designer spent most of her life trying to hide, that retell her maudlin story and give substance to a lot of rumors about Chanel. But, while the story is juicy chick lit, the book is not. What this fact-heavy prose lacks is spice.

It takes a while, but we get Chaney’s point: Chanel was a style innovator, but it wasn’t a love of clothing that made this woman tick. It was fear. Fear that she’d lose control or, worse, the independence she so fiercely fought for.

Chanel was born in 1883, the illegitimate child of an unemployed French playboy and a severely depressed mother, and lost her parents when she was 12. She grew up in an orphanage run by nuns. You can imagine how restricted her fashion choices were.

Chanel’s life wasn’t easy, and at times, it was downright degrading. She spent her young adult life as a courtesan, an upscale prostitute. She entered high society as one of two mistresses of her first financial backer, socialite and horseman Etienne Balsan, whom she eventually left for an even richer Englishman, Arthur “Boy” Capel, after cheating on Balsan with Capel.

These stories are more scandalous than those on Real Housewives.

The forbidden liaisons helped Chanel establish herself early on as a high-society rule-breaker. Her transition from milliner – her first business was a hat shop – to designer helped her express revolutionary thoughts when it came to women.

Chanel was among the first upper-class women to ride horses for recreation and to play sports like polo, so her menswear-inspired clothing – featuring pockets and baggy fits – was as much a necessity as a fashion statement.

Chaney opens the book with Chanel walking through the Tuileries with Capel. She informs Capel, who is bankrolling her business, that she doesn’t need his help anymore. His response: “I thought I was giving you a plaything. What I gave you was your freedom.”

Soon after, Capel would leave her.

That was just one of Chanel’s numerous affairs followed by a debilitating broken heart. Men would cheat on their wives with her, then leave both her and the wife to marry somebody else. Subsequent dalliances included affairs with composer Igor Stravinsky, artist Pablo Picasso, and a German soldier during the Nazi occupation of France. Chaney raises the possibility of lesbian affairs, too.

Even with her astuteness, Chanel made some bad business decisions and was swindled out of the bulk of her profit from her iconic scent, Chanel No. 5. Despite her grand staircases and travels around the world with the most revered artists, she never managed to find happiness.

By the book’s end, Chanel has become a lonely and bitter woman who spends much of her time bashing fashion, especially the miniskirt. She said she found the mini vulgar and inappropriate, seemingly forgetting how she herself had popularized a shorter hemline in the early 20th century that freed women from Victorian prudery.

Through two World Wars, Chanel survived it all. That’s because, as Chaney puts it so well, Chanel owned the zeitgeist.

“The reason she is so often credited with initiating something, such as chopping off her hair or introducing short skirts, is because she had become the quintessence of high fashion,” Chaney writes. “She knew just when to make the change, and what she did was noticed and emulated.”

It’s unfortunate that Chanel’s fashion genius came at such a daunting price. The designer, who died in 1971, at 88, remains even now a dominating force in women’s fashion. But her personal life was far from triumphant.

Read More http://www.teenvogue.com/style/blogs/fashion/2011/12/lady-gaga-is-uber-ladylike-in-chanel.html#ixzz1fkVK4IUB

Chanel and New York’s Museum of Modern Art honored Pedro Almodovar last night at the museum’s annual film benefit. “Everyone loves Pedro Almodóvar,” Karl Lagerfeld said of the lengthy guest list. “He is a genius.”

Many were thus dressed in Chanel — Sarah Jessica Parker, Anna Wintour, Elizabeth Olsen, Chloe Moretz — save a few: Lara Stone came in Calvin Klein, Joan Smalls in Tom Ford, Miranda Kerr in Peter Pilotto, and Karen Elson in Roberto Cavalli.