If you're a brand, making friends on MySpace is the easy part; making your friends count is the challenge.
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What would Euripides say?
But enough about me, what do you think of me?
We're friends and all, but I don't like you that much
Keep your friends close, and your advocates closer still
What would Euripides say?
"One loyal friend is worth 10,000 relatives," Euripides once wrote. Although the Greek playwright lived and wrote centuries before the advent of MySpace, his words have enormous value for online marketers looking to capture the benefits of friendship in the digital age. In one sense, what Euripides was saying is that less is more. Applied to MySpace, the master of tragedy might have said, "One passionate advocate is worth 10,000 people who did nothing more than click approved."
While developing a roster of MySpace friends may seem like a solid marketing goal (X number of friends equals Y number of sales, awareness, lift, et cetera), the truth, like real-world friendships, is a little more complicated. In the digital world, many marketers and brands are discovering that having a ton of MySpace friends isn't all it's cracked up to be.
But when the glue that binds the relationship between user and brand is as tenuous as a single mouse click, it shouldn't come as a surprise that marketers have a long way to go if they want to be true MySpace friends.
"I have brands that are MySpace friends of mine, and I've been very disappointed as to what they've done to cultivate me as a friend," says Paul Santello, SVP at Carat Fusion. "They have not gone out of their way to monetize the relationship. I don't spend more because I'm their friend. Shame on us for simply checking MySpace off the list; we aren't done just because we have the page up and running."
While Santello cites great media, widgets, wallpapers and killer downloads as excellent tools for making friends, he believes brands will have to look deeper to find value in having MySpace friends. Or, as Santello bluntly puts it: "Our next step on MySpace is to learn how to be better friends; that's what I told adidas. That's where the magic is."
Santello was referring to a World Cup Soccer campaign the shoe maker ran on MySpace that was since reviewed by Rex Briggs of Marketing Evolution in "The Momentum Effect," a joint research effort by adidas, Isobar, Electronic Arts and MySpace.
In the campaign, adidas built a community around World Cup Soccer with a green and a red team. Members of the community were asked to pick a team based on their preference for one of two adidas products. Users not only got the opportunity to align themselves with an adidas product, they got to comment on the brand, expressing why the shoe meant so much to them.
According to Briggs, the choice presented to members of the adidas community was a key factor in generating the momentum effect, the phenomenon that occurs when one consumer uses the brand as a reference point in their personal profile. That effect accounts for more than half of the value of a social networking campaign, Briggs wrote in "The Momentum Effect."
"One of the most sophisticated aspects of the adidas custom community is the way that consumers can align their own personality with the choice of adidas brands," Briggs wrote. "Once a brand is picked, the consumer is locked in with the brand experience."
According to Santello, a brand's true friend on MySpace works in a dynamic not unlike friends in the physical world. Brands needs to provide something of value just as a person seeking to cement a friendship needs to be perceived as fun or trustworthy.