Web 2.0 and Advertising

Should your company have a MySpace page? Plus, what to do when your ad campaign bombs.

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Web 2.0

QWe're an online market research company, and we're thinking about using online communities like MySpace and Second Life to recruit people for surveys. Is it too early to embrace these trends?

Mark Houston
Chief Marketing Officer
GMI
Bellevue, Washington

Too early for MySpace? Hardly. If you give a fig about the opinions of the young and the wired (and aren't those terms synonymous?), that's where you'll find them. And at this point the site has received so much buzz your mother's probably heard of it. Traffic to MySpace, which launched four years ago, now exceeds 115 million visitors each month and more than three billion page views a day. That's why The Onion has a presence on MySpace, says Joe Garden, features editor for The Onion and tender of the humor publication's main MySpace profile (myspace.com/onionnews).

Just keep in mind that MySpace users, more than half of whom are under 35, come to the site to be entertained. They typically don't log on thinking, "Gee, I'm sure in the mood to take a marketing survey this evening." So your page had better be visually appealing, fun, and interactive. Season your survey questions with attitude. Upload photos, videos, and music files. Give people a reason to laugh or something cool to share with their friends. Invite users to leave comments--and resist the urge to censor even the nasty ones. MySpace users typically gravitate toward pages with lots of comments. Finally, remember that frequenters of online worlds can smell insincerity a mile away. So don't hide your marketing intentions in casual user's clothing, says Rob Kalin, co-founder of New York City-based Etsy.com, a marketplace for handmade goods that maintains a profile on MySpace (myspace.com/etsy).

As for Second Life, it's probably too tricky for your purposes. This virtual world, where real people use fake versions of themselves to buy fake things with real money, boasts more than eight million registered users. But drop in on Second Life at any given time and you'll find between 20,000 and 50,000 users widely scattered about the vast virtual landscape. That's nothing to sneeze at, but in order to survey them, you'd have to create an avatar, roam the virtual countryside scouting for other avatars, and interview them one at a time by instant message. Or you'd need to set up a virtual shop with enough bells and whistles to draw a crowd. That requires a programmer familiar with Second Life's scripting language--and you'd still need someone manning your Second Life avatar at all times to chat up visitors who happen by.

Still, some Second Lifers are happy with their virtual venture. For example, GSD&M, a $1.7 billion advertising firm in Austin, has used the site to converse with individuals it wouldn't otherwise reach, mostly at virtual seminars and events. But many others are holding off. "Second Life requires a lot of effort," says The Onion's Garden. "And the party might move somewhere else by the time you can get it right."

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