Keep your friends close, and your advocates closer still
While Fay points to the adidas campaign as a model for future social media marketing, and Briggs' analysis backs her up, Santello, who was also pleased with the campaign, wonders if perhaps the brand didn't leave some value on the table.
"The end game of making a friend on MySpace is to create and empower a brand advocate," Santello explains. "With adidas, we grew very quickly -- about 74,000 friends in six weeks -- but I don't know what we got out of all of those people beyond brand lift."
For Santello, the next step for a brand on MySpace is to identify its best friends; its super advocates, if you will.
"A MySpace campaign is an opportunity to find these people and bring them inside the velvet rope," Santello says. "We can actually bring in the top 100 advocates, give them free product, empower them to promote the brand and better still, allow them to help us shape the brand going forward."
At the end of the day, according to Briggs, a brand on MySpace is a persona, and creating value for both brand and user comes down to recognizing the symbiotic nature of the relationship.
Michael Estrin is associate editor at iMediaConnection. Read full bio.