I was interviewed yesterday by Dearl Miller of Trafficology.com about marketing on MySpace. While I was preparing for the interview I tried to distill the key issues for someone trying to promote themselves (as a musician or artist) or a product or service using MySpace.
Here are the three principles I came up with:
You need to be authentic: I would explain this by saying that this is more of an attitude and approach than a marketing tactic. I think the kind of people using MySpace can spot a phony a mile away, and I think to succeed, you really need to be passionate about what you’re selling. I think this will come through in your profile and how you deal with people. While researching the book I interviewed a number of different artists to see if I could obtain some insights into how they used MySpace to promote themselves. The bands that really cared about what they were doing, and cared about their fans, had the profiles that were very engaging.
You need to interact: The Internet is a two-way communications channel; social networking sites even more so. If people show an interest in your profile, make a point of sending a thank you comment. Listen to what people have to say about what you’re doing. One of the big themes in marketing is getting closer to your customer. The idea is that the customer can help you shape the services or products you offer, so that create services or products that are more appealing to your target market. MySpace offers all sorts of opportunities to communicate with your customers, so take advantage of MySpace to interact.
You need to add value: Try to put something on your profile that will add value to the experience of people visiting your profile. It can be something as simple as information, or it can be more. A lot of the promotional sites offer backgrounds, or badges, or widgets that other MySpace members can add to their site.
I’d be very interested in your ideas. Do you agree or disagree with the principles I’ve come up with? Do you have some principles that you’d like to add?
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Responses to “MySpace marketing principles”
April 21st, 2007 at 6:16 am
we use this software to add friends and automate emails with myspace from this site. it make makeing money on myspace much easier.
http://www.myfriendbuilder.com/
October 18th, 2006 at 2:08 am
I totally agree with your 3 principles!
And I agree that people can spot a phoney a mile away.
When I first started a MySpace for my business I included video, which is one of our products.
Then, I thought, what do I do to get them to “know” my company. I had to interact and I had to add value.
So, I came up with several easy ways to help authors and publishers (my core client base) to promote and for readers to find something of value to bring them in as well.
We came up with Book Blurbs.
MySpace Books is not kept up to date. So, we thought we would do our best to represent the book world on MySpace. We asked authors to send in blurbs about their books. We simply copy and pasted, then formatted to our blog. Then, we went to the book clubs and told them about the blurbs.
It became our most popular feature.
We found a win-win for everyone. The author provided us with new material. We featured their book and advertised the blurbs. The readers found a way to not only get a book synopsis, but a way to interact with an author that they may not have had an opportunity for in the past. (We invite book clubs to contact the authors for guest blogs, etc.).
We have other things we do, but the Book Blurbs were a huge success for us!
You really need to find a something that will have people coming back again and again.