A MySpace Profile Page for Your Small Business? Intro, Video and. MySpace’s Jay Stevens on Marketing in a Networked Culture. I’m sitting at the front row of the Forrester Consumer Forum in Barcelona, this post will be cross published on the Marketing blog.
I’ve had a few minutes to visit with Jay before his presentation, he’s Vice President of Operations for MySpace Europe. He’s a long background in the internet industry, and shared with me his background in communications and the web. Key nuggets from his presentation: History of MySpace: Launched in Jan 2004, by Tom Anderson and Chris de Wolfe. Grown from roughly 1MM uniques throughout Europe to more than 24MM today. There are currently 175 employees in 10 European territories.
What’s a social network? [Jay Stevens: "User told us that 'I don't want brands to advertise to me, I want them to be my friend"] Why do people flock to social networks? So how do you take advantage of these social networks? [Why join a network rather than create your own? Groundswell (Incorporating Charlene Li's Blog): Why your co. By Charlene Li (Note: this was originally posted on Harvard Business Online, which is part of Harvard Business School Press, the publisher of our upcoming book).
As an analyst, I’m often asked by people why they should bother with services like LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace, both from a personal as well as corporate perspective. Let’s start with a fundamental premise – that all business is social and personal. Business involves people and communications and we all prize “networking” skills and opportunities. Businesses don’t strike deals with each other – people do. So we as business people already engage in social networking every day, primarily through phone calls, emails, meetings, and events. Yet, many people when they first go and experiment with a site like Facebook, don’t find it relevant to their professional lives. Let’s take the first problem – you may not have many friends in these social networks. Now for the second problem. MySpace and Facebook launch new Advertising products, why Hyper. By Jeremiah Owyang, insight from Charlene Li and Shar VanBoskirk.
This is also being cross-posted on the Forrester Marketing Blog. Executive SummaryBoth Facebook and MySpace have launched profile and network targeted advertising and marketing products. As they both use member interests and the communities which they are part of, trust continues to become key in adoption as information is passed along the network. The sheer size of MySpace’s member base, as well as the thriving local business membership will lead to success. Facebook, which brings a unique solution evolves advertisements to endorsements and encourages members to subscribe to a brand in what we are calling “Fan-Sumers” (an evolution of the consumer). Data: Highest trust comes from friends or acquaintances (Left Graph: Consumers trust their friends and acquaintances far more than any other sources –Report: Leveraging User-Generated Content, 2007) Implications for Facebook: Next Steps For Brands.
MySpace To Announce Self-Serve Hyper Targeted Advertising Networ. MySpace will announce plans to introduce a new advertising platform, “SelfServe by MySpace,” at Ad:Tech Monday.
The service itself will launch to a limited set of advertisers in the next sixty days. The nearly $1 billion Google search deal signed last year is not affected by this product. Google handles search and text ads only; the new MySpace platform is for display ads on profile pages. SelfServe by MySpace will allow advertisers to directly purchase, create (see screen shot below) and analyze the performance of ads throughout the MySpace network, in a similar fashion to Google Adwords (although the MySpace platform is for building display ads, not text ads).
MySpace will be the first of the big social networking sites to announce an advertising product such as this, with Facebook said to be announcing a similar service Tuesday. The new tool will enable users to select from a number of ad targeting factors such as geographic, demographic, and various user interest categories. Web Strategy by Jeremiah » Letters to the Web Strategy Editor: S. I’m getting a few more great letters of folks asking for info, if I know the answer, I’ll often blog it.
I track a lot of info and put onto this blog, often you’ll find it under the ‘web usage’ category tag on the right navigation. Here’s a letter I got in from a friend who’s speaking on the subject soon. Hopefully this will aid him: The current installed base and rate of increase for FaceBook? July 07 numbers from Business Week say it’s at 26 million. I was lucky to have recent reports in my mind (all from this month) so these are pretty up to date. More than Half of MySpace Visitors are Now Age 35 or Older, as t.