I run MySpace.com marketing campaigns on a daily basis and wanted share some real-world experiences and tips. I'll start with an embarrassing story.
Worst Meeting Ever
I was working on a marketing campaign with a client, and he was interested in getting his company on MySpace and using it as part of his marketing mix. We were both sitting down at his computer as I gave him a general tour of the site and showed him the basic ropes about how everything works. He commented that his 16 year-old daughter was on MySpace but he had never seen her MySpace page.
On MySpace you can search for people as long as you know their first and last name. So I put in a search for his daughter, and about five girls from across the US came up. At the bottom of the five results was a picture of a girl in a revealing Halloween costume. We both kind of laughed at it, and I made the regrettable comment, "Gee, I hope that's not your daughter."
Well…you guessed it. It was. This led to most deafening silence in a meeting I have ever witnessed. This CEO/Dad realized his daughter was into things he didn't know she was into. I couldn't wait to get out of that meeting. The point is that your daughters are on MySpace, your nieces, your neighbors...
Spam 2.0
Let me whet your appetite a little bit and show you why I love MySpace. It has been called "Spam 2.0" because MySpace has engineered a Web site that under the guise of building a personal Web page can gather an array of personal details.
Its users give large amounts of personal details about themselves, and they do it willingly. When you go to MySpace, click on "browse," then on "advanced." You will find that you can browse people using an assortment of demographic categories: single, married, divorced, ethnicity, religion, body type, income, education, sexual orientation, drinker, smoker, and more. You can also whittle down your search to a certain radius of a ZIP code.
I like to tell my clients that if you a looking for a five-foot-tall divorced mom with a drinking problem within five miles of your house, you can! I say that tongue and cheek, but the way you can zero in on your target market is amazing. That was originally why I got into MySpace marketing.
Welcome to MySpace
It's completely free to put up a Web page on MySpace. Just fill out some quick information and you have your own page and access to 50+ million members. The first step is to fill out your personal information. Next you need to design your page to look how you want it.
Finally, start building your friend list. There are many ways to do this. The most obvious is to buy advertising. That is discussed below. The next best thing is squeezing every ounce of creative juice from your brain to come up with, as Seth Godin puts it, that "Purple Cow." Just to get you started I have included an idea near the end of this article that has done amazingly well on MySpace.
In the meantime, we'll dive into the many things I've learned on MySpace.
Advertising on MySpace
I like advertising on MySpace. Its customer service is helpful and quick to respond. MySpace sells advertising mainly through banner impressions, not clicks. The costs vary, but it's in the area of $5 per 1,000 impressions. Depending on which sales rep you talk to, the minimum buy for an advertising campaign is $5,000 to $10,000.
Remember those different ways you can search for people? When you buy banner ad space on MySpace, you can target your banners so they show up only to the exact demographic you want. This includes all those specific demographics like religion, body type, sexual orientation, etc. This way, all your allotted banner impressions don't go to waste on people who would never buy your product.
If you are advertising your local business on MySpace, make sure you include your city name on the banner. Your returns will be a lot higher, because people don't expect to see their own city name on an international Web site, and they will click just out of curiosity.
B2Bs, Stay Out of MySpace
I had the utmost privilege to run a marketing campaign on MySpace for one of the most important companies I have ever worked with... my own. As I look back on the campaign it did nothing more than fail miserably, and I'm going to tell you why.
If you have a B2B business, then the best I can do is save you some time and wasted effort. My company is a B2B business. I went into the campaign with a lot of caution because I knew that MySpace was saturated with a younger demographic. However, I knew that there was also a good amount of older people as well.
So I set out on my guerilla MySpace campaign. The plan was to hit it as hard as possible for two months. Instantly, I started getting visits to my Web site; I started getting messages on my MySpace inbox; I even started getting phone calls and other positive responses from people inquiring about our services, like asking for quotes, requesting print samples, etc.
In fact, I started getting more responses than I expected. I thought everything was going well until the first month went by. I realized that no one was buying.
We have done many other advertising campaigns using direct mail, AdWords, and other techniques. So we already knew what constituted a good ratio of people who contact us vs. how many sales we eventually make. We are always tweaking the system to improve this ratio. So our system wasn't to blame for the lack of sales conversions.
With MySpace, the ratios were way off. We were getting a lot of "looky-loos," a lot of people looking around and asking questions, but not many of them were buying. After the two months, my partner and I came together to review the campaign. The data merely confirmed that a lot of interest was generated, but very few sales.
We determined that B2B advertising on MySpace was the ultimate in interruption marketing. We were able to interrupt a lot of people who really weren't looking for our product. Our time was wasted not only on running the campaign but also in the lead-conversion stage of fielding phone calls and emails.
My company won't be back on MySpace.
The Must-Have Checklist for Your MySpace Page
Here's a checklist to make sure that your MySpace page is optimized to generate leads for you. They all center around one huge rule: You must bring the business conversation away from MySpace. As long as you are on MySpace, you have to play by its members' rules.