Or How I’d Save MySpace

But Brian, MySpace isn’t dead, why does it need saving? Hah! What’s that expression, you’re dead you just don’t know it yet. Well MySpace isn’t dead just yet, but its got the path and the symptoms of a dying site. MySpace has a number of problems that befell another famous social network 4 years ago that has only recently resuscitated as a mere shadow of what it could have been (Friendster in case you were wondering, the O.G. of social networks).

So let’s outline what MySpace’s problems are:

· Traffic is flat or down

· Engagement is way down

· Growth is gone

· Costs are still super high

· No smart way to monetize

· Marketers are losing interest

· Developers are losing interest

So some of these issues are harder to address than others, and MySpace has been making strides to cut costs (slashing most of their staff) before the Google Ad deal runs out (thereby decimating their revenue). MySpace has been diametrically opposite of facebook from a product standpoint from day one. Facebook for being such a large group of people, innovates faster than any other startup out there. MySpace on the other hand takes AGES to roll out improvements, and when they do, no one knows about them.

Step 1 - Stop insulting your users just to boost your pageviews
If your CPM on your pageviews is still hovering below $0.50 as it had in the past then its really unprofitable to keep all that remnant super low response rate pageviews. Move items throughout the site that don’t need a separate page load into on page AJAX calls. Save us some time, and improve your site’s usability at the same time. Your users aren’t as dumb as you assume they are.

Step 2 - Build small and build fast
Your platform is years behind facebook’s so you need to start over and build it for engagement and as an enhancement to the user’s experience. Right now its tacked on as though it was an afterthought, rethink it, and don’t be afraid to learn from facebook or twitter. Reorganize your team into small groups that can build out new features fast, and forget the giant projects. Facebook’s photos team is 6 people, they built an app that houses more photos than any other site out there. 6 people.

Step 3 - Focus on your core competencies
MySpace was the defacto place for celebrities and music at one point. That’s being lost to twitter and facebook because they are providing better tools for their users. Myspace had the opportunity to become the defacto clearing house for music on the web outside of iTunes, but yet it dropped the ball. Why not build what pandora and last.fm wished they could?

Step4 - Out innovate on the user experience
MySpace has allowed itself to become the next friendster which failed mostly due to a lack of a solid user experience. Take this opportunity to build better communication tools, to build more forms of self expression into your platform, and to forge stronger relations for your users social graph.

So these might just be oversimplifying their problems, but sometimes you need to look at their issues from a basic level. Let’s hope for their sake MySpace manages to come up with something.

Last friday night A week ago friday, at midnight hundreds of thousands of you around the world rushed to grab the vanity url (http://facebook.com/username) of your dreams. Within minutes millions of names had been snatched up, leaving many frustrated that they couldn’t be the numero uno Mike or Steve on facebook, but it also meant a lot of fake accounts were setup to snatch generic names as well.

Apparently Facebook had thought of making it an auction, or charging for names, but ultimately decided against it because of the server load issues that would have ensued.  Personally I think they should have charged for fan pages to get custom urls if they are going to be used for commercial purposes, that’s only fair.  Those of us that didn’t secure names for our fan pages will have to wait until the 28th when they open it up to the rest of the world (i.e. the 99% of pages with under 1000 fans).

One thing though that was really silly was all the people who snatched up names thinking they were going to be able to sell them later. The thing is these people were getting the names/keywords for personal profiles, not fan pages. Its a collosal waste to build a brand or product offering on facebook using a personal profile and not a fan page. I’ll get into the whys later, but just know that you are seriously wasting opportunity by using a personal profile account for a business.

What’s going to happen to these names like /whiskey (i REALLY wanted that one, got stuck with /drinkwhiskey instead) that were pinned to user profiles? Well ultimately its going to come down to facebook yanking them, or they go to waste. Will a secondary market arise? Sure, but only for fan pages, not for personal profiles. Those who buy great keywords with hopes of turning these minor personal profiles into commercial landing pages will be sad when they realize they’ve wasted what could be hundreds of dollars on something useless.

So my advice, create a valuable page with content on it, promote it, and then see if you can grab your desired name on June 28. If you want to give yourself a clever personal username, make it something representative of you/your personality, or better yet: protect your personal brand name.

Or all you ever needed to know to avoid being referred to as a jackass

Some of you might be new to the Internet or new to social networks or just need some light suggestions, so this is for you. Every day millions and millions of people sign on to the internet for the first time, or join social networks such as facebook or twitter or myspace and aren’t necessarily privy to the social conventions that are already established in these spaces. Its my goal to teach you them in the next 5 minutes. So let’s get started with the basics.

Email:
You might wonder why I even need to include this, but you’d be surprised at how wrong some people are when it comes to email.
Do’s:

• Write a clear and concise subject
• Make use of keywords in your email (think SEO for email) to make it easier to track down later
• Use a custom signature (i.e. don’t send EVERYONE the same salutation at the end of your email – aka “Love ya boo, John Rockefeller CEO”
• Reply to emails you get within a timely manner (my theory is 36 hours max if you aren’t on vacation. 48 is pushing it. – if you are in a service business, try for under 24)

Don’ts:

• USE ALL CAPS WHEN YOU TYPE (its considered yelling, and you can turn off caps by hitting the caps lock button above your shift key)
• Send an email asking about something that you could have googled yourself.
• Don’t reply to an email with only a link to a google search for said question
• Send an email and then call ten minutes later to make sure I got it (unless it’s an important document attachment).
• Forward me useless nonsense (aka chain letters, wtf is this, 1996?)

Twitter:
I could write a whole post about the kind of jackassery going on right now on twitter, and maybe I will, but for now this will have to suffice. Following these simple guidelines will make you a more interesting Twitterer.
Do’s:

• Follow people you find interesting, or actually will care to hear about their lives later.
• Respond to people you follow when they say something interesting
• Share interesting links when you find them.
• Look at the person’s profile and recent tweets before you follow them or send them a direct message.
• Be genuine and authentic, not canned and dull
• Respond to direct messages in a timely manner (think halfway between email and txt messages – so under 24 hours)

Don’ts:

• Send automated direct messages to people who follow you. – at least not when they are sales or marketing messages
• Post only links to your site in your twitter stream (its like spamming)
• Demand people follow you, you aren’t that interesting, and its kind of obnoxious
• Get mad when people don’t follow you back, maybe you aren’t as special as you thought (I know, the horror!)
• Assume everyone who follows you is actually reading every damn thing you post (statistically, maybe 5% really are)
• Use one of these silly pyramid follower schemes, they really only benefit the creator, and are lame, they make you seem less genuine.
• Overtly ask for people to retweet everything you post. A retweet is a powerful thing, be subtle about it.

Facebook
I did a video on this a year ago, will likely follow this up with a revised post for 2009. So here are a few basics.
Do’s:

• Find your friends (real life and people you interact with) and request their friendship
• Share stuff about yourself
• Keep up with old friends
• Add your kids or parents as friends (you can always filter what they can see)
• Reply to messages in a timely manner (if you are under 21, less than 24 hours, over 21, treat it less seriously than email so 48 hours)

Don’ts:

• Add unknown random people just because you want lots of “friends” if you wouldn’t want to talk to them or haven’t interacted with them before, why would you now (send them an email first at least)?
• Spam your friends every day (the fewer things you send out, the less “noise” they become)
• Create a personal profile for a business or a product. There are special fan pages/public profiles for those things. Trust me.
• Poke people you don’t know (its like flirting)
• Request a friend, then not respond to their message back asking who you are (if you are asking them to SPEND attention on you, then it’s the least you can do)
• Ask people to donate their status to you, its cheesy, and not that effective. Much more effective would be to ask them to share a link you had shared (re-share) or “like” it.
• Publicly write pickup lines on girls or guys pictures you are trying to pick up. Send them a private email if anything.

Note, all these rules have exceptions. If you’re traveling, on vacation, or just not near the web, you don’t need to keep such a close tab on the situation.

Oh man if the newspaper industry gets a bailout, I will throw a fit. Now don’t get me wrong, I love newspapers, and I love newspaper people, I just don’t respect 99% of the businesses they run. Why don’t I respect their businesses? Well they refuse to adapt and evolve. Its like if I told you your car was stuck on the tracks and a train was coming, and instead of moving your car, you decided to build a cement wall around it…

The latest ridiculousness is the report by the API, highlighted on techcrunch, suggesting that google is to blame and that they need to piece back together their shit to the same structure it was before. If it didn’t work before, why would you waste billions trying to force it to work now? Why not spend millions and make it what people want? The report argues that hyperlinking and other “new” technologies are killing them. Oh wow, people only want to read what they are interested in? They don’t want to pay for all of your day’s content when all they want is one article? I wonder why? (if you are calling the shots at a newspaper, let me clarify, that was sarcasm in case you didn’t understand).

Lets examine the facts a bit. Previously newspapers made money selling you all their content at once in one transaction. This transaction delivered not only all of their content for the issue, but all of the ads at the same time. If you are an advertiser, that isn’t the most effective means of advertising, especially in an age where you can target and track all your ads online. Advertisers had no idea if their ads were ever being read, so its money down the drain. Newspapers profited from this fact that their main revenue stream was an unmeasurable interruption marketing scheme.

Newspapers need to realize that they are in the content business and the ad sales business. You know what, I just realized I’m wasting your time and more importantly MY time writing about this. I think this hits my quota for the quarter on posts about how the newspaper industry is dead. Why bother yammering about a sinking ship if no one on the boat wants to save it. No sense beating a dead horse. I’m gonna go read a blog or watch cnn.