But enough about me, what do you think of me?
"The secret to activating the momentum effect appears to revolve around giving consumers the opportunity to share their own story using the brand as a symbol and reference point," Briggs claims.
But the theory is the easy part, Sarah Fay, president of Isobar, explains. The hard part, she says, is linking a key aspect of the brand with the users.
"At Isobar, we believe that the brands that will win are the ones that consumers can use to tell the best stories through," Fay says. "With adidas, the competitive element that was brought out in the community is a part of the brand and it's also a key value for their consumers."
But Fay insists that the bar for a MySpace campaign is a lot higher than for print or TV because users need to be engaged with a value proposition. In other words, what worked for a brand such as adidas on MySpace won't work across the board because each brand is different and triggers different reactions among users.
One campaign that had intrinsic value for Santello was a Freewebs-designed widget for a recent New Line film, "The Number 23." In the movie, Jim Carrey plays a man who becomes consumed by the "23 enigma" -- a belief that all events are somehow connected to the number 23.
Using a widget on MySpace, New Line built brand awareness for the film by engaging potential viewers and telling them something they likely did not know about themselves. Users who played with the widget learned a little something about the so-called 23 enigma and the film, but they also put themselves in much the same position as Carrey's character. Thus, the campaign was ultimately about the user and why he or she should see the film, and not about the film in a vacuum.
According to Santello, a campaign that asks the user to reveal of themselves and then returns information of value, specific to the individual, is what MySpace friendship is all about.