or, How To Stop Worrying and Love The MySpace...or Gone with the MySpace..I'm here all week, folks! Tip your waiter!

Okay, so the MySpace experiment is going pretty much as expected. I'm actually starting to kind of like MySpace, which surprised me, since it's from Satan and all (see my previous post titled MySpace Deemed Harmful to Children...Well, Duh). I've received a few very good emails from people within MySpace talking about their experiences; here's one (with permission to post):

"I came across Myspace through my teenage daughter and through my work. I am in music retail and it has become a must to have a profile on the web for bands and record labels.

Unfortunately, you are right in many aspects, it is nothing but a giant dating game in html. With this in mind and with the situations I've encountered during my venture through Myspace, all I can say is that I am concerned about these cyber communities when there are so many kids & teens involved with adults. Adults usually know how to control most situations but teens tend to be pulled and easily influenced towards the unknown. As a parent, I am not happy with my child's presence on Myspace and I monitor her profile constantly but the direct message feature frightens me!!

As a professional, networking has not been too effective. I haven't found anything of interest that would boost my intellect or marketing creativity.

In general, I am able to keep up to date with the trends, in touch with friends and co-workers who already had a profile before I even dreamed of joining. But above all, through my couple of months as part of the community, I've come to the conclusion that it works for lonely and inquisitive people, bored teenagers, music groups and marketing, MAJOR marketing!"

This person brings up some excellent points that actually came up on Threadwatch yesterday as well - MySpace is an untapped goldmine of marketing. More from Threadwatch:

"Listen ladies and gentleman, opportunity is knocking. MySpace has 2.5 times the traffic of Google. What would you do with that kind of traffic? You can quibble about how those traffic numbers were reached, but however you slice it, it's a huge honking slice of pie. Let me repeat: There is a ****load of traffic to be tapped in MySpace."

What has YOUR experience been with MySpace? Please feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments section below, or shoot me an email at my MySpace profile. Here's a few of the things I'd like to explore in this ongoing MySpace experiment:

• How can MySpace be tapped for efficient marketing tactics?
• Is MySpace a good place for kids to hang out?
this one could get hairy
• Is MySpace worth the effort for networking? Can actual business networking, not dating, be accomplished?

Related:

• Top Ten Tips to the Top of the Search Engines: Jill Whalen is one of the top search engine optimization experts out there today. Here are her top ten tips for any site owner that wants more traffic, more sales,and higher rankings.
• Ten Steps to a Well-Optimized Site: There's always something that could be tweaked for increased web site traffic, better customer satisfaction, and a higher search engine ranking. How exactly do you go about doing that? Follow these Ten Steps to a Well-Optimized Site and I think you'll see that these goals are not as lofty as you might think.
• Top 5 Mistakes in Search Engine Optimization: Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of making your site search-friendly both to search engines and searchers. There are five common mistakes that people tend to make when beginning to optimize their sites for search engines.

Post to del.icio.us  | Digg This! |  Furl It!