TWiST, Mike Jones of MySpace and Peter Hirschberg of The Conversation Group
Guests:
- Mike Jones COO of MySpace
- Peter Hirschberg of The Conversation Group
Interview: at Digital Family Summit
- Community nuisances and their evolution help breed success in social media.
- Even though you are a large behemoth the tides can change quickly with social sites.
- Did Facebook out develop MySpace? Once you reach a certain size innovation with scale becomes difficult for any company. Mike explains that once you reach scaling limits you have to turn inward and focus on platform issues instead of innovation so you can plan for the future. MySpace has been focusing on this so he is excited that they can know do things they couldn’t in the past. He explains that these things are hard to balance because tech. companies often grow so quick.
- (13 min.)Why has Twitter taken off in such a huge way ie. it has caught the attention of celebs? Twitter has become the core people are building around it (an ecosystem) and it has no competition, it serves media companies well, builds communities fast, real time gives instant feedback and the minimalism is elegant and the communication is simple you don’t have to be a great writer.
- Expect big changes at MySpace, they are done dealing with scaling issues and will be entering a phase of innovation.
- (20 min.)What is the future of MySpace? Games and music are interesting, content aggregation, public content in nature, younger demographic and will have an entertainment focus.
- How do you go from 10 friends to 10,000, how do you go viral? The question cannot really be answered, there are techniques, Peter explains that it is very easy for a company to look inward instead of focusing on the user. They should be trying to figure out what they can give the user that is important to them, that they will want to share.
- When does social media hit the too big to succeed point? The gaming of the system hurts ie. spamming, too much irrelevant noise.
- They discuss virtual currency as being is interesting, it will eventually become a revenue stream when advertising isn’t enough but it will be slow to adopt the benefit is it is psychologically easy.
- TechCrunch50: 700 people applied and they had to make a video (pitch), companies were made up of a smaller number of people creating amazing stuff with a lot less money, massive focus on creating a business, people brought in clients and contracts.
