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10 ways to use MySpace as a promotional tool

For those who like lists, here it is in the raw. Read what follows for the full spiel.

1. Profile yourself
2. Don’t be a loner
3. Befriend random strangers
4. Browse for likely friends
5. Find your friends in groups
6. Google for friends
7. Speak up
8. Approve away
9. Gossip in public
10. Broadcast yourself
Bonus: Feeding forums for fun and profit

My first real knowledge of MySpace came during a 2006 SxSW Interactive seminar, on the topic of spreading the word about your startup, when one of the panelists stated “you will get more traffic from MySpace than from anywhere else”. Wow, I thought, that’s a pretty strange thing to say - isn’t MySpace the place where teenagers go nuts with HTML and produce ad-hoc, mostly ugly, hard to read ego-feeding profile pages? Ok, so maybe I didn’t get what MySpace was all about, or how powerful it was. And what the heck, it was free, so I went ahead and created a default profile, linked it to AustinMash!, and left it alone to focus on other things. Needless to say, my basic profile page referred exactly zero people to this web site.

That was in March, when I was still pretty busy building out the site. Later on (sometime in April) I went back to MySpace and took the time to study how it worked and what could be done with it. I saw how users modify the basic, default profile page by inserting HTML and CSS Stylesheet code into form fields that are provided to allow you to write about your interests and hobbies. Most ’spacers get their code from third-party web sites, whose sole reason for existence is to provide such code so the ’spacer can modify their page without knowing any HTML or CSS. In fact, it seems one of the reasons a lot of profiles are so cumbersome is that novice ’spacers will insert more than one set of code from, perhaps, different suppliers, whose code will then collide to produce a mess of a page. Or, they might thinks it’s cute to choose the same color for their scroll bar and it’s background, which in effect makes the scroll bars invisible, which when attached to a super-wide and long page, makes the profile almost impossible to navigate. But whatever, this is the ’spacers page, and the only ones who would care would be their friends, supposedly.

Ah yes, friends, that’s what was missing from my profile. Now, you must understand that the word “friend” takes on a different meaning in MySpace. A MySpace friend is merely another profile with whom you have mutually agreed with to call each other friends. It matters not if you actually know the owner of the profile; it matters less if the profile is even of a person. Yes, there are profiles that have been set up to just convey an idea, and generally, if you request to be their friend, they will automatically agree (”approve” you in MySpeak). In this manner, these “concept profiles” can amass thousands, perhaps millions of friends, and you show off your affiliation to the concept by including it in your friends list.

For example, one of my friends is Beer. Beer is my friend. Beer is listed alongside my other friends, some of which are real people I actually know and hang out with in real life. I am also a friend of Austin, by the way.

Another thing about MySpace friends is that they are visible to anyone who views a profile. If you land on an interesting profile, you can see their list of friends, and by clicking on the friend’s picture, you go to that person’s profile. Very often they will have similarly interesting profiles and list of friends, which you can click on to explore more profiles, and so on and so on. This is why friend-jumping can be such a vast time-sink.

Having friends on your MySpace profile is important for several reasons. First of all, if you don’t have friends, you’re obviously not popular and therefore not very interesting. Second, a couple of important features are available only with friends: the bulletin and the comment. A bulletin is a message that is broadcast to all your friends at once, and a comment is a message that you leave with one particular friend. Comments are important because they appear on your friend’s profile, and they contain a link back to your profile. So, by leaving a comment for a friend, anyone who lands on the friend’s profile might click on your picture and by taken to your profile. If your friend receives a lot of comments, however, your comment will soon scroll off the page and your link will be gone, unless you comment again.

With this basic understanding of how MySpace works, you can start to appreciate how to use it to promote your goods or services.

1. Profile yourself
You start by creating a profile that augments what you are promoting. Include links to your web site, of course. Try to create an environment, convey an attitude that represents your business. However, you have to consider how you want to separate your personal life from your business life. Is your new profile going to be based on you, as an individual who happens to run a business, or are you trying to represent only your business as it’s own entity? MySpace is geared towards individuals, but that doesn’t stop thousands of businesses from setting up their own profiles. You may want to consider taking the personal route. The rest will flow more naturally and not seem so contrived that way. Making this decision now will help guide you in your future interactions with ’spacers.

My MySpace profile was set up to mimick this site. It uses the same color scheme, has links to this blog, and incorporates the Skyline graphic. Unfortunately, due to the constraints of what you can do in your profile (for example, you’re not allowed to cover up the banner ad at the top, and Javascript code is blocked) I could not make the Skyline clickable and functional, and it’s placement was a problem – I couldn’t place it at the right height on the page, and even if I could, it wouldn’t look right. In the end, I just made it a static image at the bottom of the page, but since the image file is from the same server AustinMash! runs on, the Skyline is guaranteed to show the same ads as are displayed on the site.
Besides these items, I included pictures and some facts about myself to humanize the page. Although my profile is heavily linked to my web site, I represent myself as a person - an Austinite who runs a web site for and about Austin, Texas.

2. Don’t be a loner
Once your profile is ready, you then go about adding friends to it. You can start with your real-world friends by searching for their profiles by their e-mail address. You can find your friends one at a time from the “Search” link near the top of your home page, or if you use Yahoo, GMail, Hotmail, or AOL address books, you can find them all at once from the “Invite” link (click on one of the “Import From…” links).

You can also search for concept profiles using keywords, if that makes sense for what you’re trying to do.

3. Befriend random strangers

Asking people you don’t know to be your friend is a form of promotion in itself. When a ‘spacer receives a friend request from you they see your picture, which is linked to your profile. The prospective friend will then very likely visit your profile to see if you are worth adding to his friends list. That right there increases your profile views. Of course, like most promotional efforts, focusing in on a relevant target audience is half the battle. With 119 million profiles on MySpace and climbing, random friend requests will not be as effective in promotional terms as a targeted approach.

Here are a few tactics to find the right “friends” for you.

4. Browse for likely friends

Use the Browse feature. MySpace allows you to search for profiles based on many criteria (hint: use the “advanced” browsing tab). You can search by gender, age range, geographic location, interests, and many other factors. You can sort the results by last login time, which puts the more active users first, and moves the abandoned profiles to the end of the list.

Browsing for AustinMash! friends is fairly easy, as I can specify "located within 5 miles of zip code 78701". There are a few 'spacers in Austin: looking just for the ones between ages 30 and 35 within 5 miles of downtown yields 3000 profiles, which seems to be the maximum returned in any query. Who knows what the actual number of this "small" sample realy is?

5. Find your friends in groups

There are also thousands of “groups” in MySpace, which can also be searched for by using keywords. Groups are sections of the site where group members can discuss topics of interest to the group in a forum. In my experience, the forums I’ve seen are not heavily used, with rather shallow discussion threads. It is likely some groups are more active than others, although this is not important at this point. What is important is that each group has a list of members, and presumably each member is interested in the topic of the group. So, by finding groups related to your product, you will find ’spacers who might react favorably to a friend request from you.

A major drawback to this method is that there is currently no way to sort a group’s member list by any criteria. If a group has thousands of members, finding the most promising targets is, at best, very time consuming. But, the ’spacerSphere (the cloud of third party services dedicated to servicing ’spacers) is growing all the time, and there already or soon may be companies offering data mining services for this purpose.

I belong to a few Austin-related groups, such as Austin!, Austin Music Exchange, Austin Party Boats, Progressive Austin, and Austinites. As a member, my profile is listed in the membership rolls, creating another avenue for Austinites to find my site.

6. Google for friends

Another way to find appropriate ’spacers is to google for them. In Google’s search box, type in “MySpace” and your relevant keyword(s). The results will include profile pages with your keywords, plus blog postings that mention them. Oops, did I forget to mention the MySpace blogging feature? Yes, ’spacers can maintain their own blogs within the MySpace system. These are rather limited blogs, however, in that they do not provide RSS feeds, categories, or archiving functions. They are isolated and not a part of the Blogosphere as we know it, but this is not important at this point. What is important is that ’spacers will write about what interests them, and you can find those posts through Google. This results in a highly targeted set of users you will very likely approve you as a friend.

I found some of my profile friends after posting my ROT Rally blog entry. I found 'spacers that had written about the rally, and I added to their blog comments to let them know where they could find another perspective on the event (and more pictures, of course). I also still receive friend requests from people who were there or are otherwise interested in bikes.

7. Speak up

By the way, once you land on a ’spacers blog post that is in line with your thing, feel free to leave a comment for the post. This not only makes the ’spacer’s blog more interesting to others, it will leave a permanent link to your profile (and perhaps to your web site) from that post, which will accessible to everyone else who reads it in the future.

My Google Analytics stats show people are landing on my blog directly from the blog.myspace.com domain, which means they are clicking on the links I left in comments on other ’spacers blogs

8. Approve away

By and by, over time you will receive friend requests yourself. Some of these might well be from a real-world long-lost friend, who noticed your profile in one of their friend’s list of friends. Some of these will be from bands or other entities looking to promote themselves. And, some of these will be spam, or from profiles set up solely to lure people to porn sites or other malicious sites. Yes, like the internet at large, MySpace has its share of miscreants.

If the request is of either of the first two categories, go ahead and approve them. If you are not sure, don’t worry. Just visiting a profile of the third category is generally safe in itself - MySpace has gone to great lengths to ensure malicious code cannot be placed in profile pages, and seems to promptly remove obscene profiles. If you do land on one of those, it’s still fairly easy to tell this is not someone you want to add as a friend, and you can block all future friend requests from them if you need to. Actually, I have seen a diminished number of these types of requests lately. I guess the bad guys decided it was not worth the effort, maybe because most ’spacers were savvy enough to ignore them.

This brings us to the issue of the fine line between promotion and spam. You know about spamming - don’t do it. It will backfire on you, or at best waste your time. Problem is - what is spam? You will have to use your own best judgment on that, although you are not the final authority: the recipient is. In general, if you are providing real value and content to an audience that is likely to appreciate it, you are probably not spamming. Just try to err on the ham side of the line, not the spam side.

I "promoted" my ROT rally blog post to all the Austin related 'spacer groups I could find. Most of them removed my submission fairly quickly. Ok, so maybe not everyone who's a part of the Austin community is into rockin' and rollin' with biker babes and more. Duly noted, and I will try to be more selective in my group posts from now on. The last thing I want is to be blocked from any groups I may have appropriate content for in the future.

9. Gossip in public
As you gather friends, leave comments on their profiles. Comments can be nothing more than “thanks for the add” (meaning, thanks for adding me to your list of friends) or “have a great day”. Sometimes friends do this just to say hi, but because newer comments move the older ones off a profile, a lot of people seem to do this so their profile link remains on their friend’s page. Some of these profiles are getting hundreds of views a day, so staying connected increases your own visibility. And if your comment is interesting (you can include a picture, if the friend allows it), you can increase the chances some of those visitors will click through to you.

Also, leaving comments on your friend’s profiles makes it more likely they will leave comments on yours, which makes your profile more interesting.

This is something I need to work on more. I have left a few comments on my real-life friends profiles, and some have commented back, but I am not making enough of a time investment in this yet. I also had to remove a few comments from my profile, mostly because they were a response to my comment or an e-mail or something, and they didn't make any sense just sitting there out of context. The upshot is the comment section on my profile is pretty weak right now.

10. Broadcast yourself
The bulletin feature allows you to send the same message to all your friends at the same time. Think about this a second - this message goes to ALL your friends: real-life, ’spacers, concepts, bands, and anything else you may have in your friend list. This is one reason you should decide early on how you intend to use MySpace, and what kind of profile you want to maintain. Will you send personal bulletins - “great news - my sister’s no-good boyfriend finally moved out and took his ratty friends with him”, or will it be business - “overstock sale, special MySpace promotion next 24 hours only”? So, while bulletins can be a great way to stay connected, some up-front planning might be in order if you are concerned about maintaining a certain image. That said, if your strategy is to humanize your business, by all means tell everyone all about your bunions!

Bonus: Feeding forums for fun and profit
I’ve mentioned the group forums, where members can talk about topics of interest to the group. These are moderated by the group leader, and are either public or private, depending on the leader’s intent. But with millions of groups (the “other” category alone has over 1.5 million groups), participation activity in any particular group can be spotty, and your submissions there are not likely to receive wide viewership.

A better bet is the global MySpace Forum, which is much more active and has heavy participation. There are 22 main forum categories broken out into 80 sub categories, currently totaling over 1 million topics containing 12 million posts, and as of right now, the most recent post in each of the 22 categories is no more than 20 minutes old. That’s some lively discussion going on there folks.

With the exception of a couple of MySpace-specific areas, including one devoted to helping you customize your profile, the categories and topics are those you might find in any general purpose online forum, which is to say, it runs the gamut of possible interests. Surely one or more of them will be appropriate for postings in your field.

The MySpace forum works like most, with someone introducing a topic by asking a question, and people responding as they see fit. One difference from other forums, though, is that the high level of participation means the topic turnover rate is also high, and your responses may not have the longetivity you would expect in less popular forums. Keeping yourself visible on these forums would require an ongoing, dedicated effort.

So, is MySpace a good way to promote your business? Depends on the business and on you. The forum, the bulletins, the commenting system, and the groups are just tools you can use to spread the word about your endeavors. Like most tools, these can make you more efficient if you let the tool do the work, as opposed to trying to force it (like, by spamming). And also like most areas of life, you get out of it what you put into it. Once you’ve decided MySpace contains the people you’d like to reach in your promotions, you still need to invest the time necessary to be an active participant in the community if you expect to be noticed. Being online, social networks are no longer limited by geography, and while the opportunity for individual self-expression is unprecedented, they nevertheless continue to be ruled by the same human dynamics that have existed for centuries. Some things never change.