The excellent Popjustice has just posted an article about ex/current popstar Gareth Gates. It’s a great piece as it shows the potential for online executions to harm the brand rather than enhance it.
Basically it talks about Gareth’s online team sending out a MySpace message encouraging people to ‘top 8′ Gareth with a specific GG marketing shot. In return Gareth might look at your MySpace page. Well, woo. As PJ points out, surely Gareth would of seen your page when he accepted your friend request? But alas, no, because they’ve taken something that can be a way for fans to really connect with an artist and filled it completely with marketing rubbish.
Young bands thrive on the belief that their fans feel they might meet/become friends/snog/marry their idol. Taking a marketing opportunity that can increase and re-affirm this relationship and then removing all of its key social elements is not a sensible move.
Recent news from Rolling Stone that they want to launch a social networking site. It seems everyone is after one, they see MySpace and think oooh, we’ll have some of that. It’s also now very easy to set one up as there are loads of off-the-shelf bits of software that you can install and integrate into your site. However, unless your site is very very focused I see absolutely no point in doing it.
I think part of it is that there’s still a desire for website owners obsessing with having people come to their site to do everything. You can tell that the sales manager is in the background screaming “we need more page impressions!”. It’s the same in most media - “we need more spots” or “can we squeeze in another promotion?”. Money is of course hugely important, but these sales decisions need to be weighed up against the effect it has on the product and the relationship you have with your consumer.
I think the danger of trying to do too much is you dilute everything you’re about and it confuses the people who visit you as they’re turning up for a different reason.
If the thought behind creating a social network is a desire for them to get closer to their consumers then I think that’s an honourable aim. You just don’t need to do it yourself. There are some super-social networks - the Facebook’s and MySpace’s of the world - where lots of people virtually live. Surely there’s more value in connecting to them in their home environment rather then forcing them to come to yours. It’s a bit like saying our audience all like going to the local pub on the corner, so lets build a pub on a corner and maybe they’ll all come to us?
Naturally there are exceptions, the succesful sites are those who built tools that let users do something useful and different and then this collective act of doing something similar made the users coalesce into a growing community. The enabler for MySpace was new bands uploading music and for someone like Virgin Radio, their community has been built from people posting news stories/forum posts all connected through an establised VIP system that they sign up to all them to enter competitions/email the DJ and such.
A new company’s popped up - Super Expansion - who apparently are “dedicated to finding the most aggressive, underground ways of promotion via online guerilla marketing”, hat tip to Entrepreneur’s Journey. They seem to have three businesses. The first is using MySpace bulletins to promote sites, the second is an automated ad-poster for Craigslist and the third is a service to seed ads on bulletin boards.
The MySpace one is probably the most interesting, they say:
We’ve created a network of account holders who, between them have thousands and millions of friends. By having these multiple account holders place your bulletin it looks like genuine, organic buzz. Whether you’re a brand looking to drive traffic to a jump site, or a band establishing a following, our bulletin program is a way to spread authentic buzz to a large group of people.
I’ve suddenly realised why random normal people ask to be my MySpace friend. It’s so I can be collated and sold as a bulk campaign. I’m sure that is does alright for awareness, but only in the same way I could name you drugs like Xanax, Cialis, Voixx and Ambien. In other words I know they exist but have no need for them and certainly wouldn’t buy them a bulletin from someone who I don’t really know.
The interesting thing about MySpace is that there are some people who have very high levels of trust with their friends. They tend to be ’supernodes’, people who have well-regarded links with lots of individuals that cross friendship groups and individual locations. It would be a much more sensible and valuable business for ‘Super Expansion’
if they worked with their clients to explain their products and services to supernodes and get them to buy in to (and promote) these products. But I guess that would be a bit harder than sending our a load of spam bulletins, wouldn’t it?
E4’s new youth show Skins had a great audience for its first episode - 1.6m, much of which must have been driven by an excellent youth marketing campaign by Naked and Holler. The show’s had a dual-position with sites at e4.com/skins and MySpace. The E4 site’s allowed visitors to re-design the logo, one of which they re-brand the site with every week, enter compeititons and see mini web-only episodes that site alongside the broadcast show.
As well as showing the episodes, the MySpace site acts as a mini-hub pushing vistors to the profile pages of all the characters. Vistors can then friend either individual characters or the show as a whole. It’s interesting to see the interaction from real people in the comments on the characters pages. There’s a mix of remarks to the actors and to the persona’s of the characters.
With the characters profiles appearing alongside visitors’ real-world friends it shows how with the right product you can integrate branded activity into consumer’s own social networks.
What’s a shame is that the producers haven’t really seen the activity through post-launch. The profiles have been beautifully designed and really reflect the characters’ personalities, they include good ‘about me’ info and they even include video and audio like a real MySpace user. What they haven’t done though, is update the characters blogs. It would be great to hear each character’s own take on the episodes that have just aired and the comments from visitors would have been a great read too. It could of also gone a step further with characters interacting on each other’s MySpace pages.
The Skins campaign is easily the best execution so far of a big brand trying to replicate MySpace users activity, but it will be great to see who goes the whole hog.
