Hasta La Creative!

According to Brian Stelter of The New York Times, “the bloom has come off social networking’s rose.”

With a new design to debut this week, News Corp.-owned MySpace intends to do something about it.

With an eye toward monetization, MySpace is being redesigned beginning Wednesday with a new home page, which will be less cluttered and more hospitable to advertising. The redesign, to be done by early fall, will include a new navigation bar, search tool and video player.

On a conference call last month, Peter Chernin, president and chief operating officer for the News Corporation, toned down the grandiose expectations for social networking advertising and acknowledged that selling spots on personal profile and group pages is not easy.

Social networking represents an “entirely new form of Internet activity,” Mr. Chernin said.

eMarketer estimates that MySpace will post $755 million in revenue in the fiscal year ending June 30. MySpace would not comment on the estimate–short of expectations, but still a lot of money.

Marshsall Kirkpatrick of Red Write Web says MySapce is “one of the meatiest examples there is of the read/write web. It doesn’t get as much respect as Facebook does in part because the user demographics skew towards working class and poor people.”

Kirkpatrick continues, “While you’re trying to get your parents, your boss or your friends to read RSS feeds, appreciate Twitter or post photos to Flickr – millions upon millions of people are publishing to the web, finding value in syndicated content, reading blogs and leaving comments all thanks to MySpace. If you have a deep dislike of MySpace, you should really consider getting over it. MySpace is a good and important website.”

USA Today, like many others in the tech press, wonder what Zuck is going to do next.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, asked at the D Conference if he would sell Facebook to Microsoft for $15 billion, said no. “The end goal for us isn’t to sell the company or an IPO. The way we evaluate (offers) is how are they going to help us along the way,” he said.

Maybe Google is one of those companies who can help. “We talk all the time,” Zuckerberg says. “The last time I talked to (Google co-founder) Larry (Page) and (CEO) Eric (Schmidt) at the same time they came over to my apartment.” But Zuckerberg said he’s not a fully-equipped host. “I have a mattress on the floor and this little table in the corner with two seats…Eric came and he had to sit on the floor.”

Only in Silicon Valley…

[via Halcyon’s Twitter stream]

Earlier today, Valleywag reported that participation in Facebook’s developer forum is down, most likely due to Facebook’s new restrictions on Facebook-application spam. Valleywag praised these new rules, saying Facebook won’t miss its lousiest apps.

Now an executive from a major, well-funded widgetmaker says:

Your post misses the point. FB’s valuation is driven by the perception it can serve as a platform (or launching pad) for derivative businesses. Without that perception, FB is a $3-5 B company. Period. When developers lose enthusiasm for the “platform,” every FB employee has their net worth cut by 67%.

When Zuck announced to the ad industry last winter that his company was ushering in a new day, I knew Facebook was in trouble. It seems to me that Zuck and Co. are living inside a gigantic bubble, a bubble so big it doesn’t appear to be a bubble at all. Rather it’s simply the rarefied atmosphere of a well-endowed Silicon Valley startup. For now.

The Wall Street Journal has an article this morning about banner blindness on soc nets and steps companies are taking to be seen in these environments. One example I took note of was Slide’s Facebook “Top Friends” campaign.

Slide, which sells programs that people can use to decorate their pages on sites such as Facebook, has launched campaigns with advertisers including Energy Brands’ Glaceau Vitaminwater and Estée Lauder.

One campaign lets Slide users send virtual representations of different-flavored bottles of Vitaminwater to friends online through an application called “Top Friends.” In eight days, Slide says, users sent 10 million “bottles” of Vitaminwater.

I just installed the application. If te Vitaminwater campaign is still running, I’ll report back.

I’m happy to see my friends at Brains On Fire get some positive press for their Fiskars work.

Josh Bernoff, VP-principal analyst at Forrester Research and co-author of Groundswell, writing in Ad Age outlines the idea.

Although Fiskars products are central to the scrapbooking experience, in 2006 the company found its own image was lackluster. In focus groups, respondents told the company that if Fiskars was a color, it would be beige; if it were a food, it would be saltines.

How could the company align itself with the enthusiasm of its own customers? An ad campaign would cost too much and wouldn’t make long-lasting difference. So Suzanne Fanning, Fiskars’ head of corporate communications, teamed with a brand consultancy called Brains on Fire to create the Fiskateers.

Fiskateers is an exclusive community of crafters. You have to be invited to get in. Once there, you can connect with one of the lead Fiskateers, four crafting enthusiasts identified by Fiskars in a national search. When you join up, you get a box that includes crafting supplies plus unique two-tone scissors available only to members. But, most important, you get to connect and draw ideas and support from fellow crafters.

Fiskateers is a social application, but it’s not a campaign — it’s an ongoing effort. In just over a year, Fiskars has grown the community to include more than 4,000 members, 20 times its original goal.

I was thinking of asking Spike Jones to answer some questions about this campaign, but then I thought, “You ask him!” He’s going to see this post and I’m sure he will be happy to engage via comments. I’ll get us rolling.

Q. Spike, does Brains On Fire have a scrapbook? Is that what a blog is to some degree?

MySpace is introducing a tool that allows advertisers to directly manage their branded profiles on the nation’s most popular social site.

According to Ad Age, this is a vast change from the tightly controlled, often laborious process brands previously had to endure to have a presence on the social network. It’s also a reaction, MySpace said, to advertisers’ desire to use the community more as a standing customer-relationship tool rather than a three-months-and-split campaign tool.

It “streamlines efficiency and creative control,” said Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, which has tested the product. But more important, he said, it moves beyond what historically has been the role of a MySpace profile — as a promotional tool — to the idea of MySpace as an opportunity for a dialogue.

[via Adscam]

According to Brian Morrissey at Adweek, the agency business has miles to go before it sleeps.

TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony polled more than 60 marketers in North America, France and the U.K. to gauge how they are faring navigating the world of social media. It asked them feedback on their agencies’ abilities to help. TNS found, in its words, “Agencies don’t get it.”

Clients complained that their agencies — creative, media, public relations, design and others — typically treat social channels like blogs as traditional media. In other cases, their ideas are not backed up by practical skills in the area. What’s more, one client pointed out that his agencies have little of their own experience using social networks or video sharing sites for themselves.

Hmmm…

The agency where I work has a MySpace page, YouTube page, Flickr page, a company blog, a robust extranet with massive user participation and we bring social media solutions to our clients. I understand BFG is different, but we’re not the only one.

The Web self tends to be a marketed version of the real thing, more an example of how thoroughly we’ve all internalized the branding process than an outbreak of revelation. –Rob Walker in Fast Company

Spike Jones at Brains on Fire picks up on Walker’s FC piece on online identity and has this to add:

The lesson to be learned here? Before you sink your precious marketing budget dollars into that social networking site’s banner ads, you might want to think again. Even if it’s “targeted,” it’s still interruptive, a one-way conversation and now, might even not be that targeted after all.

In related news, BusinessWeek claims the MySpace Generation is getting fed up. The average amount of time each user spends on social networking sites has fallen by 14% over the last four months, according to market researcher ComScore.

“What you have with social networks is the most overhyped scenario in online advertising,” says Tim Vanderhook, CEO of Specific Media, which places ads for customers on a variety of Web sites.

Social networks have some of the lowest response rates on the Web, advertisers and ad placement firms say. Marketers say as few as 4 in 10,000 people who see their ads on social networking sites click on them, compared with 20 in 10,000 across the Web.