How Businesses Fare On MySpace

By: Zinn Jeremiah

MySpace's notoriety is truly phenomenal. MySpace is familiar, literally, to people in every corner of the world. This level of recognition might seem to be something admirable or coveted. Further thought about things however might bring about a different perspective. Time and again famously popular brands have seen their appeal plummet back to earth. There's a fine line in other words between popularity and overexposure. It seems that at some point, people just get plain tired of seeing or hearing about the same old thing.

MySpace at one time was a hang out for teens mostly, but since then MySpace has received every form of media coverage. As the mass media has told the story of MySpace, naturally millions of people far and wide have heard. This is the nature of the media, after all. The appearance of the media in MySpace land however may have given core MySpace users the impression that their territory had been intruded upon, and even sold out to mainstream interests.

The feeling of MySpace going corporate may have left a particularly significant impression on MySpace users. Burger King and WalMart, two big companies if there ever were any, once had profiles on MySpace. Both profiles have since been abandoned and at least in WalMart’s case it appears their profile was removed as a direct result of generating bad publicity. It seems many MySpace users were not happy with WalMart’s presence on MySpace, and expressed as much through harsh comments left on WalMart’s MySpace profile. So the profile is now gone.

The WalMart scenario may have been a lesson not just that for that company, but for MySpace as well. MySpace has apparently been surpassed in popularity by Facebook, the networking site explicitly for students. Is this due to the general feeling that MySpace had become overrun and corrupted by commercial interests? It’s certainly a valid possibility. It’s worth noting that Facebook does display advertising, Facebook does not allow companies to actually create profiles: not yet anyway. Perhaps users of any online site have accepted seeing advertising, but not the notion of embracing advertisers as regular members of the community.

All of this isn’t to suggest that MySpace is now somehow irrelevant: there are still hundreds of millions of MySpace profiles, and almost certainly millions and millions of MySpace members. But if there is something to be taken from the response to corporate presences on MySpace it may be that business sites should be presented with a light touch and without an obvious motivation to increase sales or to generate publicity. As with any other community, becoming an accepted part of MySpace takes time and a respectful effort.