Please raise your hand if you remember Betamax videotapes. If your hand is raised, it means that you're likely at least forty years old. It also means that you likely remember the showdown between VHS and Betamax formats. By the late 1980s, the VHS format had emerged as the victor.
A similar battle once took place in the world of social media. Nearly a decade ago, MySpace.com was "where it was at." The website provided anyone with a platform for creating their own personalized website. It's user interface was simplistic (nothing like designing a web page in HTML code) and gave users great leeway as far as designing their pages went. For the most part, an individual's limitations of creative expression were the limits of what that individual could do in creating and maintaining his/her own "myspace." People flocked to MySpace.com to create their personal pages--especially individuals from younger generations. For a while, MySpace was the rage. In fact, Rupert Murdoch thought so highly of it that his NewsCorp Company purchased MySpace for $580 million in 2005.
Never wanting to pass up on something that is FREE, we at Ocean Gallery eventually jumped on the MySpace bandwagon to see what it could do for our business. Essentially, creating a page required a few hours of adding text and uploading photos. After that, we needed to check in once in a while to update information regarding celebrity artist appearances and other relevant news pieces.
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| The Ocean Gallery MySpace page as it appears today--last updated in 2009! |
But it also required effort on our part to get the word out about our page. We placed signs in our stores, prompting our customers to search for "Ocean Gallery" on MySpace.com, and we repeatedly told people to "check us out" on MySpace. The problem wasn't that people didn't connect with our business through MySpace: in fact, many people did. Instead, the problem was that once people did connect with our business through the social media platform, there was little reason for them to re-visit our page. Again, people visit websites for three primary reasons: to gather information, to be entertained, or to purchase "things." The MySpace platform didn't provide us with the ability to directly sell our merchandise. Hence, our lures to people visiting our page were limited to entertainment and information. Given both that our company's "information" would change only minimally over time and that providing "entertainment" would be time-intensive with an unlikely promise of any suitable return on investment, we quickly began to doubt the logic of continuing to expend energy and time on maintaining our MySpace page. After all, after initially "connecting" to our page, what strong incentive would our customers effectively have to return to our page in the future? Moreover, aside from our encouragement for people to visit our page, how might people randomly find it?
These problems were not unique to us. Nor were they unique to businesses. Indeed, the fundamental flaw of MySpace.com was--and is--that people must proactively visit a page, the existence of which they are already aware. This flaw was especially exposed by the rise of rival Facebook, a social media platform that automatically evaluates a user's social network and personal interests in order to deduce things about them. These deductions lead Facebook to be able to make "suggestions" for its users.
Hypothetically, if I had a Facebook page and "liked" (the platform's label for being connected to a non-person entity) the Ocean Gallery Facebook page, and I was also connected to a person named "John" through a "friend" connection, Facebook might send a message to John indicating that his "friend" Joey "liked" the Ocean Gallery page and suggesting that John might wish to "like" it too. The algorithms that Facebook employs allow for rapid increases in networking connections both between people and between people and businesses. This competitive advantage allowed Facebook to replace MySpace as the dominant social networking platform. Indeed, even Rupert Murdoch eventually waived the white flag: NewsCorp eventually sold MySpace in 2011 for just $35 million.
The bottom line: MySpace is clearly not an outlet that should be aggressively pursued by businesses looking to establish a social media presence. But there is one more thing to be mindful of: even though VHS won the battle over Betamax (as Facebook ostensibly has over MySpace), the VHS platform eventually met its own obsolescence with the rise in digital technology.
Facebook (and business users of Facebook), beware...
Hypothetically, if I had a Facebook page and "liked" (the platform's label for being connected to a non-person entity) the Ocean Gallery Facebook page, and I was also connected to a person named "John" through a "friend" connection, Facebook might send a message to John indicating that his "friend" Joey "liked" the Ocean Gallery page and suggesting that John might wish to "like" it too. The algorithms that Facebook employs allow for rapid increases in networking connections both between people and between people and businesses. This competitive advantage allowed Facebook to replace MySpace as the dominant social networking platform. Indeed, even Rupert Murdoch eventually waived the white flag: NewsCorp eventually sold MySpace in 2011 for just $35 million.
The bottom line: MySpace is clearly not an outlet that should be aggressively pursued by businesses looking to establish a social media presence. But there is one more thing to be mindful of: even though VHS won the battle over Betamax (as Facebook ostensibly has over MySpace), the VHS platform eventually met its own obsolescence with the rise in digital technology.
Facebook (and business users of Facebook), beware...
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