A much needed retooling
On the surface, Myspace is, at the very least, looking and sounding good.
"Myspace used to be a Penelope of shit," recalls Ginsberg, who worked on the first-ever branded integration on Myspace for "X-Men" back in 2006. "There was a time when they seemed to be in a race to monetize every inch of space they had. Plus, you had every teenage girl displaying her desire for self expression. It just became a jungle of bad. I used to say Myspace was demonstrating 'second-hand information framed by third-hand design.'"
Not anymore.
"Myspace is now retooled in a very interesting way from a user experience," Ginsberg continues. "It is now fairly clean in terms of content and design and downright elegant as an entertainment discovery engine."
"Myspace is now offering a lot more creativity that Facebook doesn't," Lieberman adds."If you want a creative interactive campaign on Facebook, you have to do it on your own brand page and spend money getting people there to see it. I was just checking out Myspace and was quite impressed by a BET sponsorship that is quite effective on their home page. They are really doing a good job of focusing on content and wait for their users to come seek it out."
Myspace's integration with Facebook and Twitter is also helping immensely when it comes to growth numbers. "Myspace is growing again, and that is no small feat," Lieberman says. "That can be really hard to do when you are that big and have that kind of history. The sharing of content across different platforms is clearly working, and if I were them, I would keep doing what I was doing if the numbers kept going in the right direction."
