myspace anyone?

OK, I've e-mailed the support folks there requesting that they make style definitions for each of the subtables for individual access. They currently have one for the contactTable, but no other sections. They do have id's for them, but accessing them is not possible as the # gets turned into a .. when you save it. Hopefully, they'll get back to me on this one as I feel it would benefit their community to implement this.

ID declarations in css start with a # (i.e. #ctl00_Main_ctl00_UserFriends1_pnlFriends{ background-color: ffffff;})
CLASS declarations start with a . (i.e. .contactTable{ background-color: ffffff;})
ELEMENT declarations are just stated plainly (i.e. body{ background-color: ffffff;})
 
Findings So Far

Okay, here is my analysis so far in regards to the mySpace "Flatland" campaign. I'm thinking outloud as I write all this out.

This may be something worth pursuing, but it has its drawbacks. It takes an incredible amount of effort to reach enough people on mySpace to reach "critical mass" and generate enough audience for a movie to really get attention.

Here are some of the issues:
a) Friend requests are limited to 999 per day.
b) Friend requests count towards an unspecified "daily allotment" of emails, meaning that if someone sends you a message about something, you can not respond until the next day. Making management of contacts and people difficult.
c) Friend requests are slowed down by a "code" process used to prevent "bots" from spamming. I'm sure everyone knows what I'm talking about - a picture of several numbers and letters are presented, and you must type them in.
d) oftimes, Friend requests are "blanket accepted" by narccist users - that is, you send a friend request, and they accept without even looking at the profile of the person that sent the request.
e) The entire mySpace system is incredibly buggy. Unspecified errors occur on a constant basis. This slows down the accumulation of friends.
f) many people can be lurking on multiple profiles, or have logged on once or twice and have let their profiles lapse due to disinterest, etc. From what I can tell, the huge mySpace number of users is most likely inflated by a factor of at least 10. The only way to really tell the difference between a real person, and someone who will never return to mySpace, is to get them to sign up as a friend.

I have found that the only way to bust through the fog of mySpace is to go back and post a "comment" on a person's profile page in order to get them to actually pay attention to whatever it is you're promoting. And it has to be targeted - you can't just copy and paste a comment, this ticks people off.

In the case of "Flatland," I am lucky in that the film is tailor-made for mySpace. I've decided to add a profile and account for each character in the film. The film is animated, and each character is colorful and has a distinctive personality. Each character is listed on every other character's page, and each character cajoles the user to "add ALL of the characters from Flatland!"

When a mySpace user adds all of the characters from Flatland, including the movie, I consider this a marketing success. So far, I have reached approximately 50 people who have done so. This was after roughly three-four days of off-and-on attempts, hardly full-time. Whenever I had some time.

So let's extrapolate some numbers here:
1. 1 marketer = 5,000 user requests per day = appx 50 intensely interested potential customers.

If we are attempting to achieve 10,000 real, qualified customers one would have to spend approximately 200 intense man days to achieve this number. 10,000 is a small number, of course. One would prefer 100,000. This would be 2000 man days.

So, any campaign to drive up the name recognition of a movie, band, or person must be considered a very, very slow burn, unless one has a couple of employees to click and make add requests, and type in the stupid code boxes.

Thoughts anyone?
 
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Ladd said:
Thoughts anyone?
Click to expand...

I've been looking at how the dynamic works on there. It's a much less passive process than I imagined. You get more exposure when you post a bulletin that goes to all your friends bulletins. Groups are a good way to get more exposure and the forums. In order to get your profile viewed mroe, you need to do more than just link to friends...you usually end up buried in folks list of friends, so the networking portion down't do much there, but bulletins will get you on their profile page for a time until the bulletin rolls off their page. Making informative/interesting/inflamatory posts will get you eyes as well -- I don't recommend the latter for marketing. Blogging only goes to people who subscribe to your blog, but bulletins go to anyone looking at a profile of a friend. Forum posts go to a potentially wider audience depending on which topic you post to...I would imagine that using the flatland profile page in other media advertising as well would help too...get more eyes and therefore more friends to post bulletins to.
 
Good points. I've noticed however that when one posts a bulletin, it can quickly dissapear in the fog as well. It's really something that requires an enormous amount of aggressive effort, as you say.

I can imagine someone could make some money setting up a little business with a couple of college kids and computers, high-speed connection, employed to do nothing but promote a band, film, comedian or website on mySpace. Hmmm....
 
As for the bugginess and all to often occurring errors, I'd bet thats got something to do with the volume of users overwhelming the server(s).. which was my initial major problem with the site... too many people, not enough power to handle it. Along with, of course, the large number of childishness that is there.. for both the kids and others. ;)
 
...Ladd,

I got a chance to look at what you were attempting to do to promote you animation. Clever, although I don't know if I want to have 6 friend requests from the same source...:huh:

nice animation, very cool....still looking around :)

-- spinner :cool:
 
Hey spinner -

It's actually supposed to be the other way around (except in special cases of people I know from other areas, such as you...), where the target audience is supposed to send friend requests to the characters in the film, not vice versa. I've been very careful to make sure that only one friend request is sent from one character, and then that character will post a comment asking the person to befriend everyone else in Flatland.
 
Ladd said:
When a mySpace user adds all of the characters from Flatland, including the movie, I consider this a marketing success. So far, I have reached approximately 50 people who have done so. This was after roughly three-four days of off-and-on attempts, hardly full-time. Whenever I had some time.
Click to expand...

I think you've got it wrong.

How many times have you watched something because you like the character?
Luke Skywalker or Yoda or Darth Vader from Star Wars. If Lucas was using myspace as you are, Ladd, and I saw one of those characters for the first time here in someone's profile, I'd check out that characters' profile. In the characters' profile, I'd discover he was a character in a movie. So I follow that characters' friends and go to the movie. This is where I find more characters. Then I watch a teaser, a webisode, or something and decide which character or characters I like, and I ask them to be friends.

If it was Bay Watch, Pamela Anderson would max out her friend requests each day. Is that failure? No, because everyone else that sees the friend link will want to know where they can see her. So they go to the Bay Watch page and see that it's on BayWatch.com and new webisodes air every Tuesday at 9pm Pacific Time.


So, Who cares if someone watches the film for one character? You want viewers you get viewers because they are interested in the character and what becomes of them.

Perhaps you should break your film out into webisodes?

Or create webisodes that happen before the film. So you get interest with the webisodes, then you'll get a following, then when it's time to launch the feature film, you'll have a steady following.
And it's all trackable.

Just because I like Yoda, do I HAVE to like Darth Vader, AND the 20 other characters AND the entire movie for the marketing campaign to be a success? NO! Because I'd watch it to see my "friend", Yoda.
 
CootDog said:
Perhaps you should break your film out into webisodes?

Or create webisodes that happen before the film. So you get interest with the webisodes, then you'll get a following, then when it's time to launch the feature film, you'll have a steady following.
And it's all trackable.

Just because I like Yoda, do I HAVE to like Darth Vader, AND the 20 other characters AND the entire movie for the marketing campaign to be a success? NO! Because I'd watch it to see my "friend", Yoda.
Click to expand...

Hmmm! Yes, I may be thinking abut this too much as a marketer. In this case, my thinking in regards to "success" is whether or not the potential customer is interested enough to add everyone from the film. My thought process was, if they'll click 6-12 times on the characters, they'll buy the film.

You make a good point, however... I like the idea of doing little short trailers for each character...
 
With everyone signing up to Myspace, I'm wondering how long it will take for Indie to add a [MYSPACE] button next to the IM and Skype buttons. :lol:

Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful networking site, but nothing beats Indietalk.com!
 
myspace really doesn't seem all that interactive. Friends are trophies there I think. I'm trying to add targeted friend links to make it easier for folks to find all of you through me, and a couple of higher profile friends to get that traffic to mine and on to you...but here, it's interactive question answer opinion...not just passive like myspace...I spend much more time here, I can check myspace once every other day and I'm all caught up...but here, they should offer a 12 step program, I'm on here waaaay too much ;)
 
Maybe instead of looking at the forums on myspace, we just invite the more mature filmmakers from there here, i think it sounds a little better.
 
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