Thoughts On Music II

My Space - Friends in High Places

MySpace is a social networking site offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos but most importantly music and videos. MySpace is hailed as the next generation of marketing, advertising and promotion but with a difference, the marketing engine behind Myspace is dependent on the users networking skills. The downside is that MySpace.com is dependent on the user developing their own market base and do to this you need to take the marketing responsibility into your own hands. Below are a few tips on making the right moves to generate a decent market base on MySpace.

- In your design layout of the site the best rule is to keep it simple. There are so many MySpace sites out there and keeping similar layouts will help your users to find what they are looking for easily. Keep video and large file sizes down to a minimum as they will slow the site down.
- The name of the game is to get an audience (friends) but it is equally important to get the right friends to match the product you are selling. For example it would be pointless creating classical music contacts for a R&B project. Remember that this is a marketing exercise and there is no point spending a lot of time on friends that are not interested in you or your product.
- There is a magic number of friends you need to kick start your audience so, the first few hundred are crucial. As such you need to make these first friends stick to your site and offer contributions and comments on your page. This will present a genuine fan base to encourage more high profile friends you aim to attract.
- Get active, do not just build your MySpace site and hope they will come. Talk to all of your contacts in your email address book move onto blogs and chat rooms and print your MySpace address on all correspondence to get traffic to your site.
- Create incentives to keep you audience entertained. For example release one new track or mix per week and ask for feedback. You will need to spend a few hours every day emailing people to seduce them into your world.
- Do not go for the hard sell – it will turn people off. You need to engender trust and respect and this will take a more soft sell approach.
- Be consistent and patient – remember that you are not a huge brand and will need to work from the ground up to gradually generate your audience.