Altyrian View

Bulldog Reporter has an article this morning saying that Facebook and MySpace have declining memberships according to an article on The Wall Street Journal Online (subscription required). The reason – spam and illicit requests. This from the Bulldog report:

Also, it’s been seen that advertisers are taking advantage of the capabilities of both sites, and sending out mass emails and friend requests, overloading the inboxes of countless users to make their products known. This type of guerrilla marketing has been seen by many as junk mail, and has done the opposite of illicit interest in brands by turning off users to both sites.

Advertisers? Guerrilla marketing? So, I’m guessing that the joker that tries to post a comment to this blog completely off topic with a link to an enlargement product is now an “advertiser” using “guerrilla marketing.” Common Bulldog! The decline in memberships is not because of the Burger King 24 MySpace page – it’s the spammers that want us to join their group to check out their Web cam. It’s from the online “pharmacies” that have tons of Viagra. There is still good opportunities for real marketers and advertisers to use this social media space for legitimate and (most importantly) wanted advertising.

The power of social media is that it can be a great form of pull marketing instead of the traditional push marketing. Unfortunately, there are those in cyberspace who have rotten products that want to push them on us. This isn’t just a problem for MySpace and Facebook – it’s a problem on blogs, forums, SecondLife and anywhere else we can interact with one another. Although I agree that some of the decline in memberships is because of spam, I think that part of the decline is that for some, the novelty has gone away.

PRWeek has posted an article where they asked some “new-media thinkers” to make their prediction as to what will be hot for the next 6 months. Visit the article to see who said what. I’ll just list their predictions (in bold) and my commentary (not bold):

• Social networking & productivity applications going mobile
• Participation TV: I think we all saw the possibilities with participation TV when ABC’s Lost had us surfing the ‘Net looking for clues. Other networks / shows would be foolish to miss out on this trend.
• MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operators)
• Democratic editorial control: We’re talking about content being directed by sites like Digg.com and Newsvine.com. I think that not only are we going to see more of this, but we’ll see a response from “traditional” news outlets as they protect their ground from bloggers and podcasters.
• Online community measurement tools: A new service that will help PR people measure the influence of online communities on our products? Sounds awesome. I’m sure someone will try to sell this tool, but I don’t think it will come of age for a few years. I can’t imagine how this would work without the help of individual bloggers which won’t be happening for a while.
• PayPal Mobile: Pay for stuff on the go. If PayPal doesn’t do it, someone else will.
• Using tools to capture fragmented (niche) audiences: The Long Tail tells us that this trend is already upon us. For us to help our clients, it will be increasingly important to identify and target smaller, more well-defined audiences.
• Viral marketing through YouTube
• “2006 might be the year when the hype on blogs finally ends and the bigger picture on peer-to-peer media emerges.”: You’d have a hard time selling me on the 2006 demise of the blog. I’m seeing more and more “average” Web surfers start to get involved in blogs. It’s going to be hard for blogs to go away now that anyone feels compelled to be involved.
• RSS is implemented in IE7: Blog authorship is also coming to Office. Read this item and then check out the last one. Like I said, blogs will at least hit the “mainstream” before they go away.
• Microformats: The social media release has been all the buzz in PR circles, and I agree that change is upon us (look for my post on this subject later this week). The real question is “are reporters ready?”
• Second Life: I’m a big fan of SL! I think MMORPGs like this are going to become more mainstream when “non-geeks” jump in.
• The triumph of PR: Well, looks like we’ll get to keep our jobs one more year.
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Hitwise issued a press release today stating that MySpace.com is the most visited domain for US surfers. What’s amazing is that it’s surpassed Yahoo! and Google. The amazing thing is its growth over the last two years. If you look at the chart (nicely nabbed from this Hitwise blog which incidentally has some other interesting stats), you see that Google’s growth has remained relatively flat while MySpace is growing more than 4,300%.

We’ll discuss this more in our podcast, but I think this is proof positive that netizens are spending much more time engaging in social media without sacrificing their “traditional” Web surfing. I think that we can all agree that blogs and podcasts have all seen an increase in utilization (especially in corporations). SecondLife has enjoyed tremendous growth thanks to some articles in major media.

I guess it’s time for me to build a MySpace page. Will you be my friend?