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MySpace Marketing 101: How To Win Friends And Influence People

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May 24th 2006

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by Douglas MacMillan  |

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The untapped advertising gold mine that is MySpace is no longer a secret. Small businesses and major corporations alike have begun to court the site’s prime demographic and stake out their own user profiles as campaign bases, the first “commercial zones” inside a vast expanse of otherwise untamed consumer wilderness. In the absence of an established commercial pavement, these marketers are finding that driving ROI and gaining the attention of MySpacers requires playing by their rules.

…Which is to say that selling your product or service on MySpace is more like trying to win a high school popularity contest than any traditional campaigning. In MySpace land, friends are the most valuable currency imaginable. Win them, interact with them, support them, display them, and trade them. An esteemed member of the MySpace community is one that has hundreds of thousands of friends, and businesses are indeed held to the same standard.

Session 1: Get Cool

How does one go about making so many friends, you ask? Just think back to those early days of school, when you decided to shed your nerdy image and become one of the cool kids. Remember? It wasn’t all smile-flashing and handshaking. The really popular kids on the block were the ones who cheated and cut corners to get what they wanted.

Enter the MySpace friend bots. Over the past year, clever programmers have developed and streamlined tools to automate the site’s tedious friend-making process. Software applications from sites such as Friend Fetch, MyFriendRobot, Silent Productions, Friend Adder Pro, FriendBot, and MySpace Man enable advertisers to send mass friend requests, comment broadcasts, and event invites to highly targeted users in the MySpace network. While their legality remains a question tentatively being pursued by MySpace itself, the utilities have proved an immensely successful means of delivering messages to the right audience, getting users to “befriend” business profiles, and supplying click-throughs to corporate home pages.

The first key to utilizing these tools is to make certain your message will resonate within a niche community in the site. Music and entertainment advertisers work well with MySpace because they bring in relevant content for users to digest and discuss. Clothing/fashion, food, and cars are also likely topics of viral discussion, provided you hit upon the right users.

“I cannot exactly fit what sort of product goes over best with Myspace, because it really seems to be all dependent on the marketer,” Justin Lavoie, CEO of a leading suite of MySpace bot applications, Silent Productions, tells ADOTAS. “A clever marketer has shown to be able to sell just about anything through Myspace, evident by one client who has been getting sales on cars. I would say that the product should still match the demographic to some degree… I couldn’t imagine retirement insurance as being a big hoot on Myspace.”

Session 2: Target, target, target

Once you purchase and download a bot, running anywhere between $20 and $300, you’ll be presented with a targeting interface that allows you select MySpacers by personal preferences, interest groups, and various other affiliations. You can then begin sending out friend requests by the droves to pump up awareness of your profile presence. MySpace has imposed a cap of 500 invitations a day, so make each one count!

You might expect consumers in such a user-driven, community-oriented site to take particular disdain to the imposition of advertising messages, especially when they masquerade as “friends.” According to the bot software operators, this response can be avoided with effective targeting.

“When my products are used as they are designed to be used the friend requests are not shotgunned nor random,” Lavoie advises. “A general rule of thumb is 40% of the requests sent out will be accepted, on a low estimate. Because they are fitting to people who would have a good potential interest in what is being marketed, the friend requests and marketing are relevant and are accepted much more.”

Once you have built a healthy base of a few thousand users, you can take several steps to foster the viral transmission of your message through the social network. Silent Productions as well as most other MySpace bots offer “Friend Auto-Accept,” which ensures that a user will get your full attention (or at least think they are) when they take an interest in your profile.

When they add you to their friends list, the bot will also leave a personalized message of thanks on their blog. Getting your name and link on a comment blog is a cunning tactic, because in addition to the profile host, the thousands of other users who view that profile will be exposed to it as well.