Linking to this blog post feels like a good way to start the week. It includes a QuickTime clip of the South Park Underpants Gnomes explaining their business plan — which is remarkably like many business plans you’ve seen or read about, I bet.
I think Comedy Central is missing out on a good bet here: Underpants Gnomes coffee mugs, action figures, notepads and such would be cubicle staples … if they were actually available.
MySpace seems to be the Brangelina of the online world. Hardly a day goes by without another batch of stories about kids posting there, marketers advertising there or predators stalking there.
But how many people actually use MySpace?
On episode 11 of Cranky Geeks, John Dvorak and his fellow cranks repeatedly said that MySpace has 50 million users. Back in February, MSNBC said more than 54 million users. MySpace itself claims north of 82 million.
The numbers suggest a certain level of MySpace hysteria. But what do they really mean for marketers like Burger King or you or me? Not much, I suspect.
How many MySpace pages are spoof pages of friends and celebrities (like this one of George Bush)? How many pages are created and abandoned? How many people have multiple accounts? How many are created by other marketers large and small (like this one of Shakespeare)?
And there’s this: A close look at the results of several random searches of MySpace users suggests to me that about 25% of all registered users haven’t even logged in over the past year.
What really matters for marketers is: How many active daily users does MySpace have? How many users are genuinely engaged in the service? How many people reside in the geographic area where the marketing message posted on MySpace has any relevance? (There are thousands of MySpace users in Latvia, or so their profiles claim.)
Or maybe these more practical questions don’t matter at all. The cost of a company setting up a MySpace profile is negligible. It gives the trade press a hook to say the company is on the cutting edge. It gives the ad agency a hook to say they’re reaching the kids. It builds buzz … or does it?
Takeaway for marketers: Getting involved in the MySpace space? Don’t take any numbers you hear at face value.
“An exploration of human emotion in six movements.” That’s how We Feel Fine describes itself. It’s an interesting application that searches blogs for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling,” does some work when it does, then graphically represents the collective results as it slices and dices the data its gathered a whole bunch of ways. I think “murmurs” is probably my favorite, though “montage” is pretty cool, too. You can click on dots in the interface to read the actual blog post excerpts. There’s more on the methodology here, but it sure is fun to play with. (Thanks to George Pariseau over on Soflow for the heads up on this one.)
“Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.”
—Gilda Radner
