Late last month, after over two years of tweeting to an audience of more than 360,000 followers, Aliza Licht, Senior Vice President of Global Communications of Donna Karan International, made her identity known on her Tumblr blog by posting a link to her “coming out video”.
Over the past few years, DKNY PR Girl has stood out among the sea of personalities trying to get eyes on their fashion brand’s tweets. In fact, her tweets about working PR in the New York City fashion scene became so popular that DKNY won the award for Best Twitter at the Fashion 2.0 Awards last February (the brand also snagged three other awards of the eight total given that night, for Best Mobile App, Best Blog and Top Innovator).
In keeping with the brand’s theme of innovative this past September DKNY partnered with POSE (a mobile app recently featured at my meetup group’s Apps & Apps party) to construct a very innovative Fashion’s Night Out campaign. Basically, the street style photographers took pictures of guests of the DKNY Fashion’s Night Out event and posted them on the POSE app with the hashtag #DKNYFNO. Each photo automatically went to DKNY accounts on select social media platforms (like Facebook), and those who couldn’t make the event could pretty much live it as though they were there.
And to make the brand even more interactive still, DKNY PR Girl has a section on the DKNY website titled PR Girl’s Picks, usually the type of honor that goes to a real live celebrity (or nowadays, a celebrity fashion blogger).
With all that said, why did DKNY PR Girl reveal her true identity? DKNY digital marketing (namely, DKNY PR Girl) is highly revered, very much enjoyed, and still totally gabbed about. Furthermore, just over a year ago she was telling StyleCaster that, “aliases on Twitter are very common and anonymity makes it fun”.
I have to say, though I have a lot of respect for Aliza Licht, I really enjoyed not knowing who this pr girl was. As someone with a background in books (I’m talking getting in trouble daily for reading at the breakfast, lunch, and dinner table here), I really enjoy letting my imagination run wild. Finding out the real person behind DKNY PR Girl was like seeing Anne Hathaway play Andy Sachs in The Devil Wears Prada, fun, enticing, but not half as thrilling as reading about (or in the DKNY case, interacting with) a character I could picture any which way I wanted in my mind.
Everything today seems to be so, so very transparent so it’s a shame that this secret got out. Now I’m left to hope (and I don’t doubt) that Aliza Licht will keep us guessing about what creative marketing scheme is next for the DKNY brand.
pretty-innovative.com 
Almost as soon as I tweeted this post DKNY PR Girl responded with: “Thx! Now I can speak at conferences I previously had to decline & I think mostly people have enjoyed that : )”.
Now, how is that for the ultimate perk of revealing your true identity? AND how is that for making your fans happy with a *very* fast response time?
I am impressed.