Marketing, Music & Myspace

Motivated by this recent Tila Tequila story,I will try to write a few words on myspace as a marketing tool:

Myspace became over the last month THE place to market yourself, your band and much more. Even your neighbours dog might have running one of these funny little myspace friend adders. Yes, I have myself played around with a few and it’s quite amazing how fast you can seed up an account to a few thousand friends. These tools are priced around $10-40 and request around 300 people per day – more will get an account banned by myspace.
Now Tila Tequila is a phanomen by herself and might never has used things like this, but still every system will be used to the max.

But the real question is of cause what does it finally bring to the table having a zillion friends? There is no interaction at all given, cause she or her team might never be able to stay in contact with these people on a regulary basis. You might have experienced the same for yourself with the few myspace friends you got, or the people on your AIM list. You got with maybe 1-10% a core connection, whom you know from real life and have a regulary contact with.

The key to activate myspace friends lies in working activly your list and in diversifying ways to communicate and interact on a constantly basis. The crucial shift is hiddin in moving up from beeing a myspace friend to getting at least a very little share in someones life.

Most artists you love had at least one very intense time interaction frame in your life. You listend to it on a constant basis and related to them during this period. Some never get over this phase, just think about the hardcore Elvis fans who are still around. But usually it takes between one week to a few month. After this initial phase, you keep the memories or emotions you connected with this music aware over the time.

One key is to initiate this phase, which is of cause more than difficult. But the more interactions you have with someone, the closer this person gets to your life and the higher the possibility might be to get it initiated.

Direct Marketer used these principles for ages and the more communication is shifting from this age of media push to an interaction based communication model, the more these get imporant to artists.

So here are Mr Buzz’s THREE Key Elements to use Myspace to it’s Maximum:

1-transfer myspace friends into other interaction chanels which are mass compatible (email, texting, instant messanger)

2- working the list (wasn’t it good old David Ogilvy who had this study about that only after 9 ads someone is willing to buy and only every third ad will be seen. So it takes 27 to a potential buy. An this was 19something, not in todays 24h spam age.)

3- be personal without faking it. It’s about caring (But Not T-H-A-T Much to quote Herb Cohen)

Stumble it!