Marketing on MySpace Makes Dollars and Sense for The Mix Unit
Top Music Site Contracts The Worx Group to Enhance Its MySpace Page’s Design
06.05.06
Chris Rinaldi, Account Manager and Copywriter
Published by Brian Charlonis, Account Manager
Edited by Chris Rinaldi, Account Manager & Copywriter
MySpace, one of the ten largest Internet properties, is a social networking website that offers its users interactive network of blogs, user profiles, groups, photos, and internal email system. Based in Santa Monica, California, MySpace is the world’s fourth most popular English-language website and the fifth most popular in the world. The social networking website projects a 2006 revenue of USD $200 million dollars.
With more than 89 million registered accounts, the MySpace community is expanding at a rapid rate. Part of the appeal are continued website enhancements including video and song sharing through streaming media. These new features spur a groundswell of viral marketing as well as media coverage ultimately leading to the remarkable amount of MySpace users joining daily.
More recently, MySpace is emerging as the latest networking and business building tool for small businesses. Presently, there are 8,279 “Business & Entrepreneurs” groups. Many businesses see MySpace as free advertising for their products and services.
Mixtape Music, Community and Culture
A leading-edge, entrepreneurial client of The Worx Group, The Mix Unit, LLC realized the potential of MySpace early on. The Mix Unit utilizes an ecommerce website that offers primarily mechanical mixtapes (hard copy compact discs of contemporary urban music with artwork insert and liner notes) for sale online. The website also sells vinyl, DVDs, magazine, T-shirts, posters, games, accessories and more.
Featured as a top 15 entry of Entertainment Weekly’s “Best Music Website”, The Mix Unit ecommerce website currently receives about 2 million eyeballs per month. Presently, The Mix Unit services a customer base of over 30,000 individuals, primarily of the 18-35 year-old male demographic.
Breaking the MySpace Code
These synergies make MySpace’s unique offerings a natural fit for The Mix Unit to cultivate its customer base and to gain more exposure to industry DJs and artists, an important target audience.. Moreover, many artists and record labels have been spreading the word about their albums on MySpace’s dedicated Music section, where users can watch music videos, check out top artists, search for music, join music forums and more. The Mix Unit already enjoyed a presence in this Music section, but was looking to enhance its MySpace page for sales and marketing purposes.
“Our collaborators and consumers expect The Mix Unit to be on top of what’s hot and MySpace is where it’s at right now,” commented Mike Rios, President and CEO of The Mix Unit. “Our target market makes up many of the millions of users on MySpace, so it was a no-brainer that we needed to have a stronger, better looking and more functional presence on the community site.”
“The Mix Unit’s page is a perfect example of how companies can turn the incredible amount of users on MySpace into sales.”
Joe Gugliotti
Managing Member of The Worx Group
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When The Mix Unit initially contacted The Worx Group to redesign its MySpace page, the marketing agency provided an edgier, more marketing-driven look within the default MySpace template. However, the limitations of the MySpace default template prohibited The Worx Group from delivering a design that really broke the mold. So The Worx Group team scoured MySpace and discovered that some pages actually featured a higher-end design that seemingly broke the rules of the default template. At the bequest of Account Manager Chris Rinaldi, Customer Service Representatives Genevieve Ferratusco and Sejal Patel contacted the creators of these pages to find insight as how to make these custom designs, while Designer Chris Bonini tapped into online MySpace forums for answers. The Worx Group team pieced all the collected information together and figured out how to make a legitimately customized design. The method involves “skinning” a layer of html code that resides “above” the MySpace default template. One of the requirements was to keep the MySpace’s paid banner advertisements, which is a top source of income for the online community. Freed from the restraints of the MySpace default template, The Worx Group was able to create a more eye-catching, marketing-savvy design for The Mix Unit page.
MySpace Marketing by Design
The Mix Unit MySpace page takes full advantage of many of the online communities advanced features. Aside from the basic networking functionality of Contacts, Friends and Comments, The Mix Unit page utilizes a Streaming Music Player to showcase hot songs available on the company’s mixtapes, a Promo module that displays banner advertisements designed by The Worx Group to sell the mixtapes, as well as a Shop module that features Mixtapes on its ecommerce site. The MySpace page gives The Mix Unit yet another venue to sell itself and its products to a captive consumer audience.
MySpace Marketing Success
Since unveiling the new MySpace page design for The Mix Unit page a few months ago, the mixtape music company has been very happy with the results. Their MySpace Friends and users have all left positive feedback on the page-and sales on The Mix Unit’s ecommerce site have steadily grown.
“Since Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. purchased MySpace last summer, the online community has been catering more and more to larger businesses to increase its revenue, which makes it even more important for smaller businesses to offer pages with strong content and a captivating design,” remarked Joe Gugliotti, Managing Member of The Worx Group. ‘The Mix Unit’s page is a perfect example of how companies can turn the incredible amount of users on MySpace into sales.”
The Mix Unit MySpace page is the first in what should be many more customized pages designed by The Worx Group on behalf of its clients. For more information on utilizing MySpace as a marketing tool, please contact Sejal Patel, Customer Service Representative at (203) 758-3311, x-336.
Further Reading
To read more about the value of MySpace for creating new business read Fortune article “Making friends - and money - on MySpace” featured on CNN Money.
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