Social Media Story for the New York Times

 I wrote another story for the New York Times about how social media is changing the beauty industry. The last one was about how grassroots Facebook campaigns were breathing new life into discontinued products. This one is about a small but growing number of social media sites entirely focused on beauty (think Pinterest for beauty obsessives):  Pampadour.com, bloom.com, shesaidbeauty.com and baobella.com. The latter two are based in Britain. 

I spoke with William Jeffrey Ward, a social media professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, who has roughly a ba-zillion followers on Twitter (that's major currency in any country). Dr. Ward and I had an interesting conversation about the rise of niche or "interest graph" web sites and why they are booming. For example, rateyourburn.com is for fitness fanatics, houzz.com for design enthusiasts, and Goodreads.com--my new favorite site--for book lovers. (Did you know that Goodreads.com is credited for helping 50 Shades build a fan base?)

It's a brand new world.

You can read the article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/fashion/online-everyones-a-makeup-critic-skin-deep.html?ref=fashion&_r=0