Revamped MySpace Will Have iTunes, Spotify and Vevo in Its Crosshairs
August 23, 2011 by admin
Filed under Latest Lingerie News
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Forget Facebook and Twitter. When MySpace relaunches later this year under new corporate parent Specific Media and creative director Justin Timberlake, the former News Corp. social-networking site will emerge with new competitors like iTunes, Spotify and Vevo in its crosshairs.
Al Dejewski, MySpace’s newly appointed senior VP-global marketing, likens MySpace’s eight-year life cycle to that of a young male adult who found a way to express himself through music but decided to bulk up on things like classified ads and horoscopes along the way.
“This young adult male needs to be put on a diet, we need to get it on P90X, clean its system and get back to its foundation. And we’ve found that foundation is music,” Mr. Dejewski told Ad Age. “No other music destination online today can claim the breadth of partnership we have with the four major music labels in addition to the tens of millions of independent artists and the libraries of their songs.”
MySpace’s renewed positioning as a music hub will be introduced through a launch campaign later this year. Mr. Dejewski has tapped two branding agencies, which he declined to reveal, to help enlist celebrities and major brands from the automotive, packaged-goods and quick-service-restaurant categories as promotional partners for MySpace’s new brand identity. Mr. Dejewski, a nearly 10-year veteran of PepsiCo who most recently worked on strategic marketing and promotions at Turner Entertainment Marketing in New York, embodies the type of consumer marketing executive Specific Media is looking for to help lead MySpace 3.0. The company’s other recent hires include Procter Gamble vet Vic Catalfamo and former Warner Bros. and CBS exec Jim Knopf.
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“When you think about the top 10 sites on ComScore, they all have a consumer-facing platform like YouTube or Yahoo or Facebook,” Mr. Dejewski said. “Then you get to No. 6, and this weird company called Specific Media doesn’t really conjure any image in the mind’s eye for a consumer proposition. The people at Specific realize they’ve built this really successful digital network but they don’t really have anything for the consumer, so they’re looking for experts, whether it’s from PG or Warner Bros. or me from Pepsi. That way we can help them build that interactive content platform and, more importantly, that compelling position to engage and build users for these websites.”
As a consumer proposition, MySpace has gotten less and less mass in recent months, beginning the year with 73 million unique U.S. visitors in January, according to ComScore, and entering August with roughly half that base. So the forthcoming ad campaign will be designed to appeal to new users as well as existing and dormant users, through a media mix that will include print, radio and digital outlays as well as a retail component.
“We have over 70 million active users globally on a monthly basis, and in the U.S. it’s in the 30 [million] to 40 million range right now,” Mr. Dejewski said. “It’s no small database by any means. While we may have lost some traction to people like Facebook, things like LinkedIn are a very different proposition in my mind. We have a very broad reach and footprint today and one we can capitalize upon, no question about it.”
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StumbleUpon Delivers Half of Traffic, Challenges Marketing Strategies
August 23, 2011 by admin
Filed under Latest Lingerie News
How do you use Stumbleupon? The discovery engine is reportedly responsible for delivering more than half of all social media referral traffic in the U.S. — even more than Facebook and Twitter. What does this mean and why should you care?
Discover, You Shall Find?
The mere mention of a discovery engine should explain the rise in traffic. After all, how many pages do you stumble through until you find one that catches your eye? Chances are, quite a few. All those stumbles are traffic. Of course, all that traffic also leads to an 80% bounce rate. Of course, StumbleUpon usually leads us to something we wouldn’t have found otherwise.
Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Social Media Market Share
Is High Traffic Good for Business?
If a website receives a lot of traffic through StumbleUpon, what is the perceived value that traffic brings? If it’s truly organic and the user never intended to seek out the website or its product, it could mean a new customer. Though stumbles are based on the user’s interests, the process is still mostly random. Should you really build a marketing strategy based on random?
However, the reason for high bounce rates within StumbleUpon can be explained once you spend some time stumbling around. Many of the sites are out of date, poorly designed or lacking engaging content. Chances are your bounce rates are high no matter from where users gain access to it. While it’s easy to isolate the problem, fixing it will take longer.
There are a lot of websites, many created before web standards, design and marketing strategies were developed or widely available. Advocating for good content, design and usability is crucial to helping websites thrive.
How to Leverage a Stumble?
Is there really a way to capitalize on StumbleUpon, outside of improving usabliity and web design?
If your content is good, StumbleUpon can regularly deliver you traffic, especially for content that is older. Additionally, links and posts on Facebook and Twitter must entice a user with words, and sometimes pictures, alone. Whereas with StumbleUpon, the user looks at the website without help from a tidy or clever summary statement or witty headline.
StumbleUpon doesn’t represent the Internet nor could it, if it tests each link and determines its popularity based on its performance. This strategy is similar to what Google Plus wants to be. Instead of blindly stumbling based on performance or interest, Google Plus hopes that you’ll discover content based on relationships or circles. The more content shared in your circle or the more people in your circle, the better odds your content has for discovery, even though you’re mining information based on links and comments, rather than the actual website.
If StumbleUpon is a sleeper holy grail of traffic, with no definitive way to claim it, then we must let it be. For smaller sites, it may be the push it needs to claim some territory already claimed by larger sites. For larger markets, StumbleUpon can continue to be an added bonus. Agree, disagree — please let us know, how do you leverage the power of StumbleUpon?
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Tags: bounce rates, content, customer experience, discovery engine, marketing, social media, stumbleupon, traffic, usability, web cms, web design, web standards