Will MySpace's rebuild push it into your social media plans?

Social media may be in its infancy, but it’s old enough to have a few casualties.

 

The once burgeoning community Bebo, for instance, was deemed to be worth $850 million by AOL at its peak. Some two years later and the company sold Bebo for a fraction of this value. Similarly, Friends Reunited – one of the pioneering communities - failed to live up to its early success, with ITV recouping very little of the £175 million that it paid for it in 2005 when it recently sold it on.

 

A fellow trailblazer was MySpace, which eclipsed Friends Reunited to become the most popular social networking site in the world by 2006. Advertisers saw the company as the leader in a nascent market and MySpace looked unbeatable. But then Facebook emerged.

 

MySpace’s growth paled in comparison to the stratospheric expansion of Facebook and when, in June 2009, MySpace laid off 30% of its workforce, the doom-mongers were out in force. A year later, some still believe there may be cause for concern.

 

"MySpace's aim has always been to position itself as the 'home of music' - a tool for budding musicians to get noticed. While it has done a great job of developing that image, offering the kind of music streaming and playlist technology that other platforms cannot, it risks losing that market to Facebook's ‘fan pages’ which also let musicians establish a presence and manage a fan base," suggests David Donnan, director of digital agency MSG. "Facebook and Twitter enjoy more users. Therefore, Facebook and Twitter are becoming more attractive to not only musicians looking to be heard, but also the marketers and advertisers looking to reach the maximum possible audience."

 

However, within MySpace there seems little concern about Facebook, with the team dismissing it as a very different beast. "It is difficult at this point in our lifecycle to compare us to Facebook, because it is really a utility, and MySpace is more of a destination," insists Tish Whitcraft, senior vice president of customer experience and operations at MySpace. "We’ve built our own products. We have our own content. We’re the largest online presence for music on the internet. So from that standpoint it is easy to say we’re all social networks. But when you take a step back and look, we’re actually apples and oranges."

 

Nonetheless, while MySpace insists it has never hit the panic button, there was concern enough about the prospect of "losing traction" that 18 months ago it began a major rebuilding programme. This has seen the company implement a new customer experience strategy, overhaul its CRM tools and improve information reporting across the organisation. It has also seen the network tweak its design to add prominence to the site’s social stream, while this week also brought the much-publicised news that it was rolling out a sync with Facebook.  

 

And the changes won’t stop there, as the end of the year will witness the site experience a major overhaul as part of a relaunch. Indeed, MySpace is going all out to prove the doom-mongers wrong and ensure that far from experiencing a social media meltdown, it be thoroughly reinvigorated. So the question is, will users flock to MySpace and will businesses soon be factoring it into their social media plans, alongside the likes of Facebook and Twitter?