MySpace and the Marketing of a Movement in the Digital Age
The last few years have seen unprecedented growth in the numbers of Internet users with more than half of the country reporting regular use of the Internet at home and most of the country accessing the Internet from work or school. While there are a multitude of professional and scholastic uses of the Internet being reported, the number one area of Internet usage that has seen popular growth is in the area of social usage of the Internet[PDF].The Internet as a social engine has been developing for some time and the technologies through which we use the Internet are becoming ever more diverse. In addition to the normal computer-Internet connection method of usage, cell phones, PDAs, mp3 players and a slew of other devices have facilitated even more traffic on the Internet. Driving a substantial portion of that usage is accessing the social networking sites, the most significant player among them the site known as MySpace.com.
MySpace is a major phenomenon in the social usage of the Internet. This one site has boasted traffic figures on a monthly basis of millions of users, most of them young people from 14-24 who use the service to communicate between friends, to make new friends and acquaintances and to follow their favorite pop cultural icons, musicians, athletes and other celebrities who have established a marketing presence on MySpace.
Every new movie that is released by the major Hollywood studios has a MySpace page associated with it. Every musician, comedian, author and soft drink company in America that markets themselves to young people establish a MySpace presence before they establish a full blown website. No serious marketing effort toward the under 30 crowd is without plans for a MySpace campaign and therefore, the Roots Project should not be without one either.
The idea behind any MySpace marketing effort is the drive to acquire "friends" for your MySpace page. Users login to their MySpace accounts and then visit the pages of other users to learn more about each others interests, read blog entries, listen to music shared on each others' pages and link to each others' pages via the Friend Space section of their pages where they can leave short comments.
Once a link is established between pages, both users' main image and page link are displayed in the Friends Space section of both users for all their other friends to see. It is very similar to what takes place in the blogosphere in comments sections, but it all takes place on individual pages for each MySpace user and allows for the posting of their images in the comments as well. This also facilitates the introduction of both friends' users to the other friends' users.
The Roots Project has established a presence on MySpace at the following URL: http://www.myspace.com/rootsproject. Using this simple URL by including it in the signature line of every email you send, or by including it in signature lines of comments sections and message board forums will go a long way toward spreading the word of our MySpace presence. The more MySpace users that become aware of and link to our MySpace page, the better opportunity we will have to spread our name quickly among young Internet users who will become interested in what we are doing and help to support our efforts.
While there is a debate to be had about the semantics of quantity of RP members vs. quality, no matter where you come down in that debate an effort MUST be made to reach out to younger people if the Roots Project is going to succeed. No one is saying we should go find thousands of MySpace users to join our cause, or to dilute our message for the youth market. Young people have much more at stake these days in what goes on in Washington DC than in the recent past and every effort to reach out to them and inform them on issues is of paramount importance to our cause.
posted by FiniFinito @ 11:35 PM
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