The overall site look is understated, with the white and light blue background hues allowing the photography and videos to stand out. Generous leading and font sizes also make for a pleasurable and not ‘over busy’ browsing experience. The CNT team hasn’t forgotten that in travel, pictures do the talking, with large panels used to display attractive hotel and destination photography.

The content of the site is similar to before – destination and activity guides give users tantalising snippets of the contents of the full magazine and there are plenty of references to the ‘offline’ magazine to drive subscriptions.

New interactive features include a blog by CNT’s offline editor, Sarah Miller, and a feed from the magazine’s twitter account. In addition, there’s a readers’ Q&A which, if it takes off, will provide travel companies with an opportunity to promote themselves if they can provide relevant and considered answers to potential travellers’ questions.

The major innnovation is the introduction of a hotel booking engine in association with Travel Intelligence as predicted by Cream in October.  This is heavily promoted throughout the site and it’s clear that the new revenue stream opened up by this feature were an important reason behind the re-launch.

For advertisers, the options are now wider with more ‘aspirational’ ad formats available than on the old site.  Bigger banners have been introduced, as have double MPUs, double Skys and page sponsorship opportunities (the homepage is currently ‘woodpaneled’ by the Canadian Tourism Commission.)

In all, from a design perspective its a huge improvement on the old site, which was looking rather dated, and from an advertiser’s standpoint it now offers a more aspirational environment with formats that better showcase their premium offerings.

The challenge going forward will be for the CNTraveller.com team to up the pace in the creation of high quality, branded and interactive content to keep their visitors coming back for more.

At the Dolce & Gabbana show, fashion bloggers  Scott Schuman, Bryan Yambao, Tommy Ton and Garance Doré were seen tapping away at their laptops from seats usually only reserved for the likes of Anna Wintour,  whilst the show was streamed lived on the Dolce & Gabbana website.  With 16m hits in just a few days, D&G’s YouTube channel became the most watched in the world for a 24 hour period.

Louis Vuitton also broadcast a recent catwalk show live, through Facebook from Paris, attracting 50,000 guests from its 750,000 fans on the social media site.  And the celebrity-inspired power of twitter was demonstrated when a Lady Gaga tweet led to so much traffic to the live stream of Alexander McQueen’s show that his site crashed.

Since the shows, we’ve seen the launch of Burberry’s www.artofthetrench.com, a site which combines the appeal and talent of Sartorialist blogger Scott Schuman with the power of social media to deepen relationships with existing customers and forge relationsips with new ones.

And Gucci has launched its latest eyewear range with a viral campaign rather than using traditional media channels.  Its site, www.guccieyeweb.com, lets visitors upload their own photographs and then displays their picture as if were a reflection in the various eyewear styles. Users can share their ‘eyewear reflections’ on facebook, twitter and on the social bookmarking sites.

So should all luxury brands rush headlong into social media? No – as with all marketing, the starting place should be an understanding of your target market, followed by a clear strategy.   For luxury fashion brands, ’mass’ social media is a more obvious move as their lower entry price points makes them accessible to a wider audience.  For brands with a narrower appeal, the strategy might be very different – more personal relationships built via closed or invitation only networks rather than openly accessible ones.

The problem is that many brands aren’t engaging with social media for the wrong reasons – either because they don’t understand how their customers are using it or a fear of losing control of their brands.

Recent research shows that the affluent are just as likely to use social media channels as the mass market, albeit for more rational and less frivolous reasons. And those that comfort themselves with the thought that their older profile of customer has so far shunned social media should understand that the continuing growth of sites such as Facebook is being fuelled by the over 55s.

As for the fear of losing control, conversations have always taken place about luxury brands that were beyond the control of the brand owners. Social media helps to facilitate more of these conversation and spread them faster and wider. But it also makes those conversations more visible and gives the brand a chance to both get involved with and facilitate them – to deepen relationships with existing customers and create relationships with potential new ones.

Social media is just one of the channels available to the marketer and the right social media strategy starts with an understanding of who your customers are and how they’re engaging online. As a starting point, Forrester’s Social Technology Profile Tool should give you some clues. Then start to monitor what’s been said about your brand and where. Once you start to understand where and how your customers are interacting online, you’ve taken the first step to building a considered social networking strategy.

One thing is for certain, with developments such as real-time social search and Google SideWiki on the horizon, luxury brands ignoring social media aren’t going to be able to ignore it for much longer.

However, most significantly the Times online suffered a drop of 8.4% year on year to 18.5 million global unique users providing a challenge for the paid for models success.  It is possible the paid for model will launch before the end of 2009 making the Times ABCes interesting to watch.

There is speculation it will change again for the October ABCes with the celebrity news on Stephen Gately and X Factor contributing to the Mail’s traffic and pushing them to the fore again.

How to Spend It.com Launches

The FT’s How to Spend it launched it’s website last week.  It is written and produced by the same team as the magazine but includes exclusive online content, including videos, blogs and new columns.  The website covers all lifestyle subjects including travel, fashion, food and drink, luxury and art and will no doubt attract the readers of How to Spend it.

The website has a great luxury look and feel with the hidden navigation bar and subtle advertising which appears next to articles, as well as brand micro sites.  The How to Spend it fashion shoots are also included on the website in a gallery format but with extra video content.  The website is set up for users to spend a substantial amount of time reading content with the added tools to change font size, amend line spacing, print the article, and adjust the contrast of the article.  There are also options to search the website and bookmark favourite columns, to improve the user experience.

This can be attributed to 2 main factors - advertisers following their customers online and an increasing need for measurability.

However the figures disguise the fall of display online advertising which is down by 5.2% year on year.   

Although display is down, 2009 has seen some positive moves online.  For example Burberry are dominating the magazine websites with interactive formats such as the roll over double MPU’s on Elleuk.com, back stage videos and display advertising - they could be seen as trailblazers for the fashion and luxury sector thinking of investing more online.  With display advertising set to rise 3% year on year in 2010 there could be more luxury and fashion brands taking the leap to online display for Spring/Summer 2010.

Magazine online portals are faring well also; this year has seen Condé Nast’s Brides relaunch as well as IPC’s Marie Claire and InStyle with much-improved sites.  The larger, more impactful formats such as the double MPU’s and double Skys are encouraging more premium and fashion brands to run online brand advertising as they allow a more powerful brand presence and produce better than average click through rates.

The demise of the ‘lad’s mag’ continues apace. Following the closure of Maxim in April, both Loaded and FHM turned in disappointing figures, with year on year falls of -23.8% and -16.2% respectively. In an attempt to bounce back FHM has reduced its cover price by £1.40 to £2.50 with the November cover dated issue. This is indicative of the desperate state of the lad’s market and speculation remains that the print editions will disappear altogether over time and their survival will be as online channels only. There appears to be an online audience for this type of product. Dennis Publishing’s online lad’s magazine, Monkeymag.co.uk, now has over a million unique users each month.

 At the premium end, Esquire was disappointing, posting a year on year fall of 9.3%.  The title is hoping that its strategy of introducing ‘special issues’ such as the recent hard back September issue, will help it to regain circulation in the next ABC’s.  Esquire’s fashion and lifestyle rival, GQ, was also down -7.7%.

The decline of the market targeting 30 something women continues, with Easy Living, She and Marie Claire’s circulations all decreasing year on year by double digit percentages.  However the recent re-launch of Marie Claire, with previous InStyle editor Trish Halpin at the helm, has greatly improved the title, re-establishing its fashion credentials and shifting the focus away from the more ethical route it had been following. 

Despite the difficult market, there are still signs of new life in the market. A new launch from the publishers of the freely distributed men’s magazine Shortlist, launches on the 7^th October. Stylist will initially distribute an ambitious 400,000 copies per week in four key cities, London, Manchester, Glasgow and Birmingham, targeting an up-market, working woman. The editorial will combine fashion and beauty but without the same celebrity focus of weekly competitors, Grazia and Look.

Social networking is still taking the digital world by storm; with 77% of UK adults aged 15+ using social networking (BMRB). Facebook continues to grow and surprisingly Socialnomics.com reports the fastest growing segment is 55-65 year old females. 

 2009 has been the year for Twitter, According to Hitwise Twitter received more visits than MySpace for the first time in the week ending 29^th August – this comes as Socialnomics.com reports 80% of Twitter usage is on a mobile device.  New research from Nielsen Online also reveals that Twitter has a surprisingly older profile base in the UK.  50-64 year old users of Twitter account for 22% of the entire UK Twitter audience, compared with just 11% of 18-24 year olds, with the largest share of the audience being 35-49 year olds.