Marketing to Myspace Users: A Real Example

April 20, 2006 4:30 pm / 8 Comments /

As Myspace has grown to be a 800 pound internet gorilla the web business world has been trying to figure out why it’s successful and perhaps more importantly how to take advantage of it and market to it’s user gigantic user base. I’ve seen many people talk about using Myspace to market their business, but I’ve seen very few examples of it being done successfully besides the music industry.

I was made aware of RollerWarehouse and the success they’ve had by creating a news ticker of their rollerskating-focused blog posts for people to put on their Myspace profile pages. Here’s an example profile with it going, and here’s the ticker in action:



Roller Warehouse: Aggressive Rollerblade Skates

The kicker is that by running this on your Myspace page (or any other web page for that matter), you can get 5% off any order you place with RollerWarehouse. So, if you’re into rollerskating, you can put news on your Myspace page to make it cooler, and you can get 5% off your orders. Not bad.

So how has this worked out for RollerWarehouse?

In it’s first two weeks of action RollerWarehouse.com went from a Google Pagerank of 0 to a 6, sales for March were up about 10% over 2005′s sales which was their first increase in 4 years. The program has a viral effect as other Myspacers see it on pages and add it to their’s, so the link benefit is just growing, as well as the number of customers taking advantage of the 5% off. They currently estimate that 50-75 new news tickers are being placed today for a total somewhere between 750-1000 total tickers running on people’s pages.
Why is that Google Pagerank important? Well, now everytime they highlight a product on their blog, they get great natural search results in Google for that search term. For example, they went from nowhere to being ranked #1 in Google results for “aggressive skates”, and are currently sitting at #2. That is one of the top search terms for their industry.

How much work was this for RollerWarehouse? Not much, simply creating the news ticker and getting it adopted by the first few users.

What a simple and great way to market their ecommerce business and blog.

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Posted in: Ecommerce, Random, Social Networks
  • David Shim

    Great example of a company creating a “widget” for MySpace to generate traffic back to their site. I think the other hugely successful industries to take advantage of MySpace has been video hosting sites (YouTube) and image hosting sites (PhotoBucket).

    I wonder at what point MySpace will limit these type of widget advertisements? Since MySpace’s business model is based on advertising, and essentially these sites are advertising on MySpace for free through these widgets.

  • http://www.conversionrater.com/ Pat McCarthy

    Thanks for the comment David.

    I’d say YouTube and Photobucket are less of advertisements and more like common services used by Myspace users. However, it’s of course allowed for huge growth in Myspace. Myspace banned YouTube videos shortly after they released their own video feature.

    I could see at some point Myspace banning ticker advertisements, but it might take some serious work since they do allow certain types of code to be placed on profiles. It’s hard to totally distinguish through technology what is and isn’t an ad.

  • http://www.webpublishingblog.com Andrew Johnson

    I think News Corp. and Myspace both understand that intervention doesn’t help. Although they seem pretty serious about cracking down on adult content, they are pretty lax on everthing else.

    In fact, there is a band I listen to, not very well known in the US but in South America and Europe they are pretty big. Someone created a fake Myspace profile for the band. The manager sent Myspace a message demanding they remove the profile. Their response was for the whole band to take a picture holding up a sign that says Myspace.com. The manager refused, and finally a month later they took down the picture.

    Thats an anecdotal story, but I believe its a larger representation of whats going on at Myspace. If you are spamming Myspace with fake profiles promoting dating sites you are asking for trouble. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be too worried. On the other hand, if you craft the promotion in a way that encourages users to spam Myspace themselves, you could end up in the crosshairs.

  • http://www.conversionrater.com/ Pat McCarthy

    Good points Andrew. Myspace is so vast at this point I think it’s tough for them to police everything, and in some ways what makes it so successful is that isn’t full of rules and regulations. The freedom of Myspace is why many users enjoy it.

    I think there is definitely going to be time for smart marketers to take advantage of Myspace’s userbase.

  • http://www.myhotornot.com My Hot or Not

    Pretty good idea. I hadn’t seen marketing like that implemented before. It definately paid off for them – kudos.

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  • http://onceyoustartdancing.blogspot.com hajra

    great example, helps me to understand more about social networking sites, because currently I am doing a research to understand how that actually works, therefore I would be very grateful if someone knows more about these examples (myspace, facebook, friendster etc…), some kind a directory or something whatever just to see others experience as well.

    thanx

    H.

  • http://adderbadder.com steve

    I know of lots of successful websites that use Myspace to drive traffic to them. Most of these companies use software programs such as http://www.adderbadder.com to add thousands of MySpace users to their list. Programs like this can help you add friends from anywhere on MySpace – grab other people’s friends, grab friends from Groups, or simply browse for friends by zip code, age, sex, etc.

    It’s worth checking out: http://www.adderbadder.com

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