Today, I received this comment from Northern Nevada Business on our MySpace site. Since it may be hard to read in the below image I will repeat it here -

NORTHERN NEVADA BUSINESS
thanks you for being one of our business
friends! We recently passed 500 profiles,
a testament to the popularity of Myspace
and our strong local economy. Search
through our ‘View Friends’ and find
the latest additions to the local
Myspace ‘Yellow Pages.’

Very cool! There is quite a community of MySpace users here in Northern Nevada where we at Twelve Horses call home.

I often hear people, especially from techies and those within the web marketing profession proclaim that MySpace is dead. This could be attributed to the growing popularity of sites like Facebook and Ning, but it is in reality just a perception. Yes, it would be nice if MySpace would incorporate a new design and better functionality, but it is still growing strong. Check out this recent article from TechCrunch. A brief excerpt from that article:

According to comScore MySpace grew from 55.8million unique visitors in August 2006 to 66.8million in April 2007, just shy of a growth rate of 20%. Facebook had a higher percentage growth rate, but off a much lower base, moving from 14.8million to 23million over the same period. The difference is traffic is approximately 3 to 1.

If it is any testament, we constantly receive new comments, event invitations, and requests to add friends, and several of us here at Twelve Horses do in fact read them. For example, I’ve learned of really cool events happening around me that I might not have otherwise been aware of or attended.

Naturally, there is always a lag time between when early adopters begin using things like blogs and social networking sites, and the time at which businesses actually realize the benefits. (I suspect businesses are a part of this growth.) Once businesses attempt to enter that new realm of customer engagement, they often do not approach it properly and either do not realize any results, or they actually go so far as to taint it for many of the current users. You have to be strategic and understand your audience.

Additionally, there are a lot of other useful social marketing sites, and some to be aware of are:

1. Digg
2. del.icio.us
3. StumbleUpon
4. Technorati
5. Squidoo
6. Flickr
7. LinkedIn
8. Facebook
9. Ning
10. Yahoo! 360

There are many more but that will get you started. And for those bloggers looking to extend their posts, check this out - http://shareicons.com/

tags: social, marketing, myspace, networking, blogs, bloggers, northern, nevada

This entry was posted by Robert Payne on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 11:07 am and is filed under 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.