Category: Marketing

After more than a month of intensive work, preparation, marketing, and craziness, Bum Rush the Charts is here. You know what you have to do.

At last count this evening, MySpace is about to overtake, in terms of “population” the nation of Pakistan. Now, some would argue that the raw number of MySpace profiles is not an accurate count of how many people actually use the service, but I’d argue that population census surveys aren’t all that accurate anyway – how do you account for the homeless and the illegal immigrant population in any given country?

At 163,740,888, MySpace, if it were a nation, will shortly be the world’s 6th largest population. Oops, 163,743,337. I just hit refresh in my browser.

With this many people on MySpace – even if only 1/3 of them are active users – social networking sites are a force to be reckoned with and a marketer’s dream or nightmare, depending on how you approach the services.

So, how do you approach MySpace? Here’s my thinking on the topic, which is admittedly influenced by a very tasty margarita. MySpace is a hub, in the sense that on the information superhighway, there are certain intersections that a large number of people pass through on the way to their final destinations. MySpace is one of them, like a city that springs up at the intersection of two major highways. Having a place to call home on MySpace establishes at least a token residence in that neighborhood, from which you can plant a sign in your front yard advertising your presence. This is the most basic use of MySpace, and vitally important at least as a defensive measure to prevent someone else from living at MySpace.com/YourNameHere.

Second, MySpace is a bridge. There are a lot of people on MySpace, including people who you might not get access to in your daily interactions offline or online. Some progressive CEOs have MySpace pages, as well as other top executives and leading edge marketing professionals. You might not necessarily reach, say, the CEO of Twist Image (a leading Canadian marketing firm) via conventional channels, but you might find him on MySpace or Facebook. MySpace can bridge the gaps set up in normal social interactions to people who are interesting.

More importantly, MySpace allows you to infiltrate the social space of people who have dissimilar social spheres from you. If you’re in marketing, this is critically important, because it allows you access to your audience, and your audience may well not be your peer group. Most of us tend to have friends that are relatively close in age, social class, income, etc. It’s just the nature of life that our friends tend to be people somewhat similar to ourselves. This is changing as the world becomes more digitally connected, but for now, it’s largely true. That means that if you want to understand what your customers in a different generation or area are thinking about, MySpace can give you access to them, to talk to them, to ask questions, and most important of all, to listen.

Listening and gathering information is the key to MySpace. Make friends with your customers and their friends, subscribe to their blogs and listen carefully to what’s on their minds. Through this, you can gain insights into their behaviors that under normal circumstances would be impossible. There’s a phrase – the perils of introspection – which Malcolm Gladwell talks about from time to time, in which the very act of asking the question skews the result. If you don’t have to ask the question at all – if you just have to listen, then you can get unadulterated answers.

Time to wrap up this blog post with this number: 163,776,951

36,000+ profiles since I started writing two hours ago. Are you listening?

HBR Ideacast had a fascinating little gem in a recent episode – a twist on Malcolm Gladwell’s connectors (from the Tipping Point). Their version – that unless you have the amplifying power of a network, like Oprah, an idea may not necessarily take off like wildfire unless conditions are ripe for it.

The analogy given was a spark in a forest. A spark is much more likely to start a forest fire if conditions are right – drought, high winds, etc. – than under normal or wet conditions. Furthermore, you don’t have to be anyone special to be the one that starts the spark as long as conditions are right for a fire.

If you’re in a forest that is unfavorable for fire, then you need to have more than a spark – you need to have a blowtorch and a few gallons of gasoline. The Ideacast folks made a passing reference to Oprah and her media empire, but what if your media empire is your network, your personal reach? If you have a large, large network that is automatically more favorable to the spread of your idea (because they know you) then the spark you create is more likely to catch and spread than a random network or no network at all.

Networks are power amplifiers. Your voice can be amplified through your network, made stronger, louder, more clear with the help of others. This is why collaboration is so vital, and why things like bickering and petty politics inside the new media community are so absurd. Our voices together are far louder than any one of us apart. Even the rockstars in our community have comparatively little reach compared to someone like Oprah, who has a much larger audience and farther reach. Together, we could probably match her, but even in little cliques, we’re far from that kind of power.

This is also why the philosophy of “give to get” works so well in social media. You have favorable conditions in the form of your network, but in order to accelerate a campaign, the fire itself has to be intensely hot so that it catches quickly and spreads quickly. This, to me, comes in the form of value. If what you have to share with your network is of value, it will spread faster than something that is purely self-serving.

As a marketer, can you make your offering so value-rich that everyone who touches it gains value? This makes me think of network effects and fax machines again. What can you create of value that not only is something that is worth sharing, but as it is shared, it increases the value of what you have? The 2000 blogger project comes to mind – every time you pass it on, you provide value to someone else, but you also get great value as it’s passed on, because it generates continuing inbound links and Technorati buzz.

This is where I think projects like LinkedIn LION networks really shine – as you build your network, you add value to others’ networks, and vice versa.

Today’s puzzle: how the heck to do this with student loan consolidation. What can we do here that can make the value of an individual consolidation more valuable?