Myspace finally decided to break their design, in a move that is sure to make a huge improvement and likely lead to an increase in adoption from people still on the fringe. Why is this relevant to businesses? Good question. Myspace finally getting around to doing a redesign means they could reach critical mass and become the online media player equivalent of ABC, NBC, and CBS were when television was born.

Myspace is already huge - swelling it’s user base by double digits every month. However, the demographics still slant young - despite what Nielsen says. Older gen-xers and the last wave of boomers will eventually adopt, and when that happens Myspace will become the biggest advertising player since Google. Social media advertising is growing more into rich media, which means that smaller businesses will have trouble competing with the enterprise for ad space. The cost of branding on a site like Myspace has already become cost prohibitive for many small businesses.

This is why I advocate an organic social marketing strategy. It’s a more targeted, and less media intensive way to leverage the network effects of social media - and is accessible to small business. Smaller businesses have always had the advantage of being personal. An organic social media strategy plays on this strength, while the larger firms leverage big ad budgets to do rich media ads. Working a blog and social media strategy together, builds community in a way that creates relationships - something the web is not known for in business.

This new Myspace redesign is great for small business. It’s going to give the CMO at big brands something to focus on, while the guerilla tactics of the strategic SMB go viral.

Tags: Social Media Marketing, social-marketing, social-media, social-networking

This entry was posted on Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 8:21 am and is filed under Social Media Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.