The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing, & Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly

Chapter 19. Social Networking Sites and Marketing

The popularity of social networking sites including MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, and Xanga is phenomenal. Social networking sites make it easy for people to create a profile about themselves and use it to create a virtual network of their offline friends and to make new friends online. According to comScore Media Metrix,^[1] MySpace had 55 million unique visitors and Facebook 14 million unique visitors in August 2006. Of course, not all visitors to these sites create their own profile, but there are millions and millions of people who do create one to share their photos, journals, videos, music, and interests with a network of friends.

Check Me Out on MySpace

Marketing on these sites can be tricky because the online community at social networking sites hates overt commercial messages. Acceptable marketing and promotion usually involves an offline personality creating a page on a social networking site to build and expand an online following. It is common for members of rock bands to have a MySpace page. For example, Boston-based rock band Guster^[2] has a popular MySpace page with a network as of this writing of 88,391 friends.

Volkswagen has taken a different approach. With tongue firmly planted in cheek, marketers at Volkswagen created a MySpace profile page for Helga,^[3] the German character who appears in some of the company’s TV commercials. Visitors learn Helga’s Likes (“I love the smell of gasoline. Gears turning, oil burning, ...