Taking Advantage of Walled Gardens
What to do if you are a news organization in today’s web2.0 world, or a business trying to reach your target audience via the media? Well the news last week that MySpace was becoming a news outlet presents tremendous opportunities for savvy marketers.
According to Terry Heaton “MySpace is getting into the news business with launch due in early 2nd quarter, according to inside sources and the company’s own sales materials.
- MySpace News takes News to a whole new level by dynamically aggregating real-time news and blogs from top sites around the Web
- Creates focused, topical news pages that users can interact and engage with throughout their day
- MySpace is making the news social, allowing users to:
- Rate and comment on every news item that comes through the system
- Submit stories they think are cool and even author pieces from their MySpace blog
- MySpace users previously had to leave the site to find comprehensive news, gossip, sporting news, etc. With MySpace News, we bring the news to them!
So what does all this mean to marketing professionals? I believe that one of the benefits of Web 2.0 is that it allows mid-size and small companies to make a bigger splash.
The MySpace demographics continue to age and as Internet properties continue to develop walled gardens of content, an opportunity exists for savvy marketers to take advantage of the changes underway in how news is reported.
One thing that struck me about the MySpace News press release was that they dynamically aggregating real-time news and blogs from top sites around the Web. To me that screams RSS. If you business is not optimizing your press releases and using RSS feeds to distribute them, then your press releases are being ignored.
Lee Odden had a great piece recently about Press Releases as Marketing Tools. In the article Lee has some great points about distributing your press release and also “the importance of creating a blog enabled media room on your site that includes an RSS feed to make it easy for interested parties, including journalists, to subscribe to company news”
MySpace and USA Today is only the beginning. More and more social networking sites and taking the walled garden approach. That means that they will rely more and more on blogs and RSS feeds to continually entertain and inform their readers. For marketers this provides a tremendous opportunity to build awareness and gain mindshare online.
Filed under Brand Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (1) : Mar 11th, 2007
March 11th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
[…] Original post by Social Media Optimization and software by Elliott Back […]