This is a guest post from Leona Laurie, Communication and Society Master’s student at the School of Journalism at the University of Oregon, part of my PR Campaigns class and all around cool chick.
I love MySpace. I get teased for this a lot by my peers, but it has been the source of a lot of good things in my life, so I will defend it and my addiction to it. As a marketing dork, I get kind of drooly with lust when I think of all the ways in which I can access demographic data and members of a young target audience without paying for it. As a self-promoter, I love the ease with which I can alert hundreds of people at a time to my latest project or product. (Have you been listening to my radio show? Have you been reading my blog?)
In the year and a half that I’ve been involved with MySpace, I have had a variety of networking successes come out of it. In addition to reconnecting with old friends and meeting new ones, I found the kernel of inspiration that led me to the U of O and met the person responsible for getting me the job I have now at the McDonald Theatre. MySpace also strengthened a friendship from college that had kind of petered out, but has now blossomed into a partnership on an exciting non-profit organization and planning a national indie rock tour.
My latest testimonial comes out of that tour and my late-night efforts to promote it via MySpace. Now that our Web site, IndieRoots.org, has launched, my partners put up a MySpace page and we teamed up to spread the word. I decided that the most effective way to get my “friends” on board would be to forward the IndieRoots page individually to roughly 200 of my MySpace friends, asking each of them to add it.
As I write this entry, 29 of my friends have added IndieRoots. That’s more than a ten percent response rate, which is better than I ever hoped for when doing direct mailings on behalf of my employers or clients in the “real world.” In addition to taking the requested “add a friend” step, more than half of this group e-mailed me to acknowledge receipt of my request, and to tell me that they’d gone beyond the MySpace page to look at IndieRoots.org. Without a tool that made it as easy as MySpace does to allow people to jump effortlessly from my request to our product, the response rate would have been significantly lower.
Beyond the satisfactory direct benefits of this MySpace campaign, I am enjoying a couple of indirect rewards for my late-night effort. While sending out my requests, I received an e-mail that blossomed into an IM chat from one of the guys behind the Podcast and Vlog “Ask a Ninja.” Now we’re friends, and they have skills and connections. They’re full time vloggers! I also received an invitation from a friend of a friend to become a contributor on his new NPR show. Not bad for a night’s work.
