Marketing Profs

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.