Using My Space to Build Your Business, Part I

Recently I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Kathy Cana Murillo, a Latina crafting expert and author. (Warning, her excellent page plays music … I know some of you folks are sensitive about that <grin>.) Kathy has used MySpace to build a list of 7000 and sell A LOT of books in just a little more than a year. Her experience was an eye opener!

I’m admittedly a My Space virgin (and a newcomer to this well established form of online promo) … and the scales have fallen from my eyes! A few juicy facts: more than 1 million members currently network like mad on My Space, so you make friends of friends of friends – accumulating people on your list who are generally quite naturally targeted to just what you do.

For those who don’t know about social networking sites, the idea is list building based on common interests. You add friends to your page because they like what you do. They want to be friends!

This is far better for targeting your marketing efforts than, say, getting sign ups for your ezine list off of Google Adwords. Yes, using keywords does separate down your market pretty well… but nothing targets like verbal pass along. People naturally share on MySpace with their friends – and what they share is prequalified to interest all. Best of all, it comes with friend buzz.

Or, say someone does a search on your genre on My Space -- they come in ready to make friends, play and get involved. The entire point of sites like My Space is to find cool stuff! And no, by the way, it’s no longer just the realm of teenagers looking for love interests. My Space has a growing percentage of adult and business users.

This seems like a natural fit for any business, like Kathy’s, that is all about doing fun, relaxing stuff. And, because it’s crafting, it attracts the crafter community.

I’ll be doing a call in April with another social media expert, Lena West, who will be guiding us on how to use these sites for more ‘hard’ businesses that don’t have the warm, fuzzy, R&R angle working for them. If you want to get a notice of it, be sure to sign up for my bonus at the top of this blog. Then you’ll be on my list.

Check here tomorrow for just how Kathy built her list to 7K on My Space!

Using Friendster and MySpace to Build Traffic

The wonderfully wonky Wibbels (Andy, that is) has posted some good stuff on Social Bookmark sites and how folks are using them to make friends and influence people. His comments come to us courtesy of a white paper by info systems wonk Danah Boyd. I’ve really had MySpace, etc. on my mind lately, like ‘I gotta get on to this thing … how do I find the grown ups there?’ So I’m listening.

For the uninitiated, MySpace is a site where anyone can post a webpage that tells others all about their loves, pet peeves, friends, favorite songs, etc.. And yeah, if that sounds pretty high school, it is! The thing is, there are literally millions and millions of visitors to MySpace every day now. This thing is serious!

Inevitable, then, that all sorts of businesses are worming their way on to MySpace. So my goal is to figure out how I can capitalize on this, too, as can my clients.

Here are some conclusions Andy/Danah draw about the medium:

• Social technologies succeed when they fit into the social lives and practices of those who engage with the technology.
• People use the social technologies that all of their friends are using.
• Social technologies need benevolent dictators who love their constituents.
• It’s not all about productivity.
• It is not about technological perfection .

What it is about is connecting – which is all that buzz marketing, or ‘grapevine marketing’ or viral marketing or any of these various iterations are about. Suitably impressing folks that you’ve got some valuable content to share so why not drop by?

Some time this winter, I’m going to host a free teleclass/webinar with a very cool social media expert I met at PodCamp, Bryan Person. He’ll be letting us in on how to really capitalize on this trend and find your folks through it.

Viva social book marking (and thanks, Andy and Danah!)