Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Is MySpace YourSpace?

Over at MarketingProfs, Stephan Spencer has a nice little intro to MySpace for marketers.

The most important message: understand it before you dive in.  MySpace is not somewhere where traditional interruption marketing is likely to work well. It's also not "social networking" in a way that makes sense to many older users; although many of MySpace's users are (gasp) over 35, the "friend" concept is not really the same thing as a "friend" in the traditional sense. (Otherwise how could anybody have 100,000 friends?)

Social network marketing was a big deal in 2006, and that won't change; we'll also continue to see marketers make mistakes and do things that leave the MySpace community sneering as everyone tries to sort out just how to make this work. The other important message that Spencer offers is "Keep it real." That's almost a cliché, but that doesn't make it wrong; being a MySpace "friend" might not be the kind of personal relationship that the word calls to mind for many of us, but it's doesn't mean "marketing target in my database," either.

I'm particularly interested in how organizations for whom MySpace isn't an obvious fit (that is: not a band, not a record label, not a hip clothing line) have used it successfully. Any good stories to tell?

No comments: