Finally got a new phone with a decent camera so going to start doing the classic Trendcatching myspace spotting again. This one was found in Camden last night - the twist is that bands are now putting their facebook page on their stickers as well as myspace ... interesting development - let's see if we can spot anymore facebook invasion of the band space
Got some pictures the other weekend of myspace sponsorship of the 1234 free music festival in Shoreditch park. Not sure entirely how the sponsorship worked, but i think they may have chosen some of the bands off myspace. The branding was pretty well done e.g. not too in your face with a small logo on the main stage plus these banners below dotted around the festival.
Hoxton Lab is the old Electric Ballroom just on the corner of Hoxton Square that hosts gigs, club nights, drinking and so on. They are promoting their myspace profile by painting it across the front of the venue.
It's right next to the world's largest myspace advert which kind of reduces the impact but its still a pretty radical approach to myspace friend-finding and brand building. Does it also indicate that myspace is still cool in Hoxton?
It's been a while seen we looked at the myspace graffiti phenomena in Shoreditch - 6 months ago it was all about promoting your profile on myspace, these days its mostly anti-myspace stuff people are writing. Maybe the club promotors haven't caught up yet?
These were all taken at the brilliant Casa Blue on Brick Lane - the best drinking place in East London.
One aspect of flyers and posters for clubs is that they often feature a roster of logos at the bottom from record labels, co-promotors and so on that are supporting the night. This provides some co-branding which helps give the night credibility. Anyway, it's interesting to see that myspace has started appearing as a co-brand at the bottom of some of the club posters out and about in London - see below. The photos are geotagged if you want to try and spot them yourself in East London.
The conclusion - Tila Tequila may be pissed off with myspace, but club promotors still see it as a valuable brand they want to be associated with.
So this has got to be the world's largest myspace advert - its a massive billboard at 333 club on Old St. (There's got to be an easy way of showing a google map or something for all these locations - if anyone knows how give us a shout in the comments).
What is this worth in free advertising for myspace/ News Corp!? A massive advert in the heart of the coolest place in London, reaching thousands of hip, young people wearing extremely tight jeans every day. Can you see any other brand getting free advertising like this? Basically, this shows the power of the X-Factor in social networking sites - myspace has it, and that's what makes it so valuable.
There are lots of services emerging that let you enhance, customise or "pimp" your myspace profile. One of the best ways to do this is with a "widget" of some description. Widgets are a good way of adding colour and content to your myspace profile without making it completely unreadable and unusable. Widgets typically work by letting you paste in a bit of text/ code into your profile which links to the widget site and serves up your photos, videos or other stuff in the widget on your myspace profile.
For web businesses, creating these kind of widgets is a great way to gain users. Pete Cashmore of the Mashable blog calls this "Feeding the myspace beast" which is a great way to describe the strategy. At the moment it is mainly silicon valley startups that are building myspace widgets, it will be interesting to see if any big media companies start getting clued up to this over the next year or so.
Here's a quick run-down of some of these widget tools.
Photos
Slide creates a sweet-looking flash photo slideshow which you can embed into your myspace profile as a way round the 12 photo limit in the photo gallery and a better alternative to posting pictures directly. The slides look quality on your profile with a nice white ipod-esque design and you can choose different sizes. and so on.
Here's one I made earlier showing off some of the photos of people promoting themselves on myspace.
Rock You is an alternative to slide which is better suited to making a short slideshow with captions and so on and also doesnt require you do download a client to your PC - you can just make it online. You dont even need to register - just enter an email address.
Here's a Rockyou effort knocked up in 1 minute:
Videos and multimedia
Stickam is a multimedia widget that lets you upload videos and audio as well as photos. You can also stream live video onto it from a webcam and use it as a chat system. The registration process is a bit of a pain to be honest - they need to take a leaf out of RockYou's book.
This took about a million times longer than the others to create btw.
| Get Stickam for Free. |
Abazab lets you upload video to what they call a "Playbox" which sits on your myspace profile. Your mates can also upload stuff onto it too. This service has only just come out of Beta so its early days but it could be a good-un.
Here's my playbox.
Hotlists
Nabbr lets you "broadcast your stuff" by creating a list of films, music, books, DVDs, fashion or anything really that you rate. You can choose from the stuff already on the site or create your own items. Could be quite a good visual way of showing what kind of books, music etc you like rather than using a text list in the myspace "About Me" section.
Here's a quick one using some of the default items:
Mypicklist lets you share links to products and your reviews of them e.g. DVDs, music etc and you get a share of the cash if people go on to buy them. You have to link to partner sites to get this revenue share (e.g. amazon, eBay etc).
News Feeds
Feedostyle lets you create a widget showing headlines from a blog, website or other source by just pasting in the RSS feed link. Most blogs and websites have RSS feeds now if you look for them or you can use the default sites instead. Could be quite cool on a myspace profile to have a feed of news from your football team perhaps or something personal like that.
Nooz lets you add news stories and websites you like to a ticker box or list on your myspace. There's a really cool bookmarklet you just drag onto your browser which lets you add stories really easily. This could be good for music news about your favorite bands or somthing.
There's loads more of these things emerging all the time - will probably try and put together a full list in the near future.
