stedavies.com - communications consultant

Jay Stevens, vice president of sales and operations, MySpace: How to utilise online communities – how important are they for the future of TV?

Shows MySpace promo video:

“That’s what happened in the last 12 months. It’s been extremely active. We’ve seen a significant growth curve. But what I want to talk about how to utilise online communities. I’m going to talk about who the MySpace generation is. To categorise social networks, you could say they’re:

* individual profiles
* Public commentary
* A traversable publicity network.

[Mentions the history of MySpace and its growth in the UK market. Talks about the growth of social networks in general.]

“Who are the MySpace Generation?”

“Half of YouTube’s videos are watched on MySpace which is good for us as we don’t pay the bandwidth costs. The kids today have grown up with the internet; they’ve grown up owning their own media experience. They’re looking for ways to express themselves and connect with other people.

“So what is MySpace?”

“MySpace is actually ‘TheirSpace’. [Shows examples of MySpace profiles]. There are over 160m profiles worldwide (9m in the UK). 62% of 16 – 24 year old are engaging with media. I.e. Uploading pictures or videos. So pretty significant and these are the early adopters.”

“So how do brands take advantage of the MySpace network?”

“I’m brand X so I need to identify a ‘brand champion’. The person who evangelises the brand on the brand’s behalf.” [Shows example of H&M branded Madonna MySpace page].

“So how are MySpace users connecting with brands?”

[Shows examples] “Adidas MySpace has 000s of friends. Wendy’s restaurant in the US has 000s of friends. Ideally this is best leveraged by the brand giving something of value to the community and the users become advocates. They should reward participation. We’re now moving from the traditional broadcast model to a world in which it’s moved completely viral. Anyone can become a broadcaster in their own right.”

“The biggest success we’ve had to date was with Skins (Channel 4 TV show). We secured exclusive content for MySpace. We started with a trailor as a teaser then we broadcast the first episode before it was broadcast on TV. We ran a competition and a series of mini catch up episodes. As of last count there were 300000 views but that count was a some time ago. We now have double the ‘friends’ now so it will be considerably more.

“Users want to own their own media experience. What users did with Skins is they felt that they were collaborating with the show. But this can work for any show… It’s a case of identifying the users for that particular show.”

Question: Has MySpace ever been used as a test run for a TV show?

Answer: “Yes it goes on quite often. We encourage TV producers, film makers etc to do that. It serves as a great way for these people to see how much interest the show is generating.”

Question: How do you deal with unlicensed content?

Answer: “We have a number of technologies and a dedicated team. A third of our employees are for this reason and making the site safely for our users.”

Jay Steven: “Thank you”