Stephan Spencer (one time scientist, now marketing guru) is writing a series of articles about marketing on MySpace, and his latest post makes some interesting points, which I’d like to expand on.

Spencer interviews Michael Bolding at Pugster, online retailer of charms and jewelry. The business has a MySpace profile, which it is using to help generate traffic and sales. Bolding provided some advice on how to use MySpace as a marketing vehicle. His key points were:

• Focus on the right group for your product or market – don’t get overwhelmed by the numbers.
• When you first start you need to get as many friends as possible, and Bolding suggests targeting bands (who also want as many friends as possible)
• Use MySpace mail as a softsell tool to build relationships with people
• Be patient as it takes time to build credibility. Provide something interesting, such as blogs or music - “the only investment is your time”
• Keep it personal, and don’t go over the top with the selling
• Simple profiles work best
• Don’t let your site become a slow loader (ie too much junk so that it slows down)

What I think is interesting is that if you look at Bolding’s advice, it’s consistent with some broader, well-established themes that you learn in marketing school, and which I’ve talked about here and in my book Hacking Myspace( in the chapter that provides advice to bands on how to promote themselves).

First the importance of segmentation, ie targeting the “right group”. Whatever you sell, you cannot be all things to all people, and it’s vitally important to identify a target market, and than focus on reaching that market. Obviously, since Bolding is selling charms, MySpace is a great promotional platform for him, but even then, not everyone on MySpace wants to buy charms.

Second, adding value to the experience of visitors to your profile helps you engage potential customers, and helps to generate interest in whatever it is that you’re doing.

Third, be easy to deal with and make it clear what you’re about and what people can do to follow up. In my profile I provide a link to this web page, as well as a link to Amazon where people can buy my book. I actually had a conversation about this yesterday when I met someone at a cafe and it wasn’t clear whether there was table service or whether you had to order at the counter. My colleague said that he had on occasion walked away from an unfamiliar cafe because it “was just too hard”. Don’t let people leave from your profile because it’s not clear what to do.

I was interviewed yesterday by Dearl Miller of Trafficology.com about marketing on MySpace. While I was preparing for the interview I tried to distill the key issues for someone trying promote themselves (as a musician or artist) or a product or service using MySpace.

Here are the three principles I came up with:

You need to be authentic: I would explain this by saying that this is more of an attitude and approach than a marketing tactic. I think the kind of people using MySpace can spot a phony a mile away, and I think to succeed, you really need to be passionate about what you’re selling. I think this will come through in your profile and how you deal with people. While researching the book I interviewed a number of different artists to see if I could obtain some insights into how they used MySpace to promote themselves. The bands that really cared about what they were doing, and cared about their fans, had the profiles that were very engaging.

You need to interact: The Internet is a two-way communications channel; social networking sites even more so. If people show an interest in your profile, make a point of sending a thank you comment. Listen to what people have to say about what you’re doing. One of the big themes in marketing is getting closer to your customer. The idea is that the customer can help you shape the services or products you offer, so that create services or products that are more appealing to your target market. MySpace offers all sorts of opportunities to communicate with your customers, so take advantage of MySpace to interact.

You need to add value: Try to put something on your profile that will add value to the experience of people visiting your profile. It can be something as simple as information, or it can be more. A lot of the promotional sites offer backgrounds, or badges, or widgets that other MySpace members can add to their site.

I’d be very interested in your ideas. Do you agree or disagree with the principles I’ve come up with? Do you have some principles that you’d like to add?

Do you ever start loosing your enthusiasm for your blog? Read this story “Blogging for dollars” from Business 2.0 to keep up your enthusiasm.

By the way, Business 2.0 is the only newstand magazine that go out of my way to buy (and it’s quite expensive out here in Australia). There’s always something interesting in each issue, and if you’re looking for business opportunities, online  or not, you’ll always see something ot get the creative juices going.

It’s well-researched, and well-written, and if you’re interested in the blogosphere and new media, it should be on your reading list.

I have no association with Business 2.0; I’m just a very impressed reader.

You’re about to start a new blog (or you want to expand an existing blog), and you come across blogging networks such as b5media or On Topic Media (Orble). How these networks seem to work is you sacrifice a percentage of ad revenue in exchange for being part of the blogging network. Depending on the model adopted by the blogging network, you may or may not own the blog, and you may or may not receive some kind of subsidy to help establish your blog.

So what competitive advantage do you gain by joining a blogging network?

The barriers to entry of starting a blog are very low; ludicrously low, I think.

To get some perspective, let’s look at print magazines, which I think were the old-world equivalent of the blogosphere.

Some years ago I started what became a successful computer magazine, FREE ACCESS. It cost $30,000 to print the first issue, and there was a huge opportunity cost in terms of unpaid wages because my business partner and I had to quick our day jobs to create write and layout the magazine, and sell advertising.

Compare that with blogging. Blogging platforms, like WordPress, are completely free – and if you’ve never tried WordPress, you’ll be impressed by just how powerful it is, especially when used with plug ins. As far as investment of time to get a blog started, I think it would be fair to say that as long as you know your area, you can get away with spending about an hour a day to get your blog started. As far as selling advertising, you can use Google Ad Sense to sell your advertising until you get to a critical mass where it makes sense for you to start exploring other opportunities.

So to distil the key issues raised so far:

• There is unlikely to be much a technological advantage gained by joining a blogging network – the technology is free, and most of the problems you’ll face have already been solved by other, so you’ll find free solutions on the Interney.
• Is there a selling advantage? Ie will you be better sell advertising by joining a blogging network? Google Adsense is incredibly efficient, and because it dominates the market, it’s much more likely to be able to deliver advertising that matches your site. Most blog networks use Google Adsense anyway, so if anything, you’re just adding a middle man to the process who is taking a cut? On the other hand, a blogging network will know how to optimize advertising so that it better works on your blog – but this is something you can learn by trial and error, or you can simply buy one of the many Adsense books on the market.
• One of the big problems with there being such low barriers to entry is that there is a lot of competition (though not all of it is real competition, which I’ll talk about in a future blog). This means is that differentiation (another future blog topic) and the product develop process are really important (another future topic) – but you don’t need to join a blogging network to get these right.

I think the real competitive advantage offered by a blogging network is a marketing advantage. After all, one of the big challenges of publishing a blog is for it to be noticed. So the question to ask yourself is will the marketing benefit outweigh the cost of a reduced advertising margin? I think this needs careful evaluation, and I’d be really interested in your opinions — I want to explore this in more detail in future blogs.

There are other issues as well, such as, who owns the blog, but let’s leave that for another time as well.

I seemed to have raised more questions than answers in this blog, but hopefully that will give you plenty to comment on and give me plenty to write about.