BlogIndiana Richmond
This evening I attended the Blog Indiana event at Indiana University East sponsored by Summersault Website Development. Brad J. Ward, CEO of BlueFuego — a web-based higher education marketing and recruitment company — gave a presentation on the future of social media. It was an interesting presentation and Brad was a good presenter. While I didn’t really hear anything new about social media and networking, I did come away with one bit of anecdotal information that could come in handy.
During the presentation Brad mentioned the 6 big social networking sites that universities participate in and on that list was MySpace. Being a geek I follow and participate in most social networking sites and it has been my opinion that quite frankly MySpace is dead, so I promptly tweeted my doubts about MySpace being one of the big 6 sites. My tweets were quickly answered by two other attendants and IU East faculty:
@JODaltonIUE: @BeckyMcKimmy, yes, MySpace is still relevant; @iueast has more than 900 on MySpace, about 750 fans on FB. #blogindiana
@aaronmhill: @BeckyMcKimmy Some people still have landlines, don’t they? #BlogIndiana
And Brad went on to discuss the necessity for primary research and knowing your audience and specifically used the IU East website’s use of MySpace as an example. IU East surveyed incoming students and found out that a much larger percentage of their students used MySpace (a “dead” website) than Facebook and used that information to propel their site forward.
The point that Brad and both twitter respondants made was that despite prevailing perceptions about the popularity of social media tools or any tools for that matter, knowing your existing and intended audience is always key. Just because your fellow tech-geeks have declared a social media network “dead”, doesn’t mean it should be discounted. If your audience uses that network and not the popular one, it is vital that you reach out to them where they are, not where “they should be”.
March 15th, 2010 at 10:34 pm
Thanks for your thoughts, Becky. I’m happy we were able to bring Blog Indiana to Richmond, especially with such a great speaker as Brad. If your readers missed out on the presentation, they can go to http://blogindiana.com/tv to watch it in its entirety.
March 15th, 2010 at 11:09 pm
I watched the live feed & didn’t feel like I missed anything by not going. I didn’t really hear anything new either. I too was surprised to hear that MySpace isn’t dead (btw, what were the other 5 networking sights he mentioned? I’m guessing from his presentation Facebook, LinkedIn, plus others?)
I understand about going to where your audience is, but If you’re going for more than numbers (which hopefully most organisations & businesses do), purely having more fans on MySpace doesn’t automatically make it better for networking. You also have to find out what kind of people you’re attracting on which platform, and adjust your presence on each sight accordingly. Which I think I heard him saying when he talked about not gong to LinkedIn to recruit new students in the same way, but that it’s great for alum community building). It would have been nice to hear some new ideas, though.
March 15th, 2010 at 11:18 pm
@Travis the 6 social networking sites he mentioned were, in no particular order:
-Facebook
-YouTube
-Twitter
- LinkedIn
- Flickr
- Myspace
He also gave an interesting statistic that more people play farmville than use twitter.
March 16th, 2010 at 2:55 am
Earlier in the day, during our departmental consultation, he mentioned that MySpace no longer considers themselves to be a competitor with Facebook — they are trying to re-brand / re-purpose back into the “place to go where you can network with bands and stuff.”
We’ll see.
A lot of people may use myspace, and even be active on it, but so far they have not done a whole lot of interaction with iueast on it. We’re going to try a few things over the next couple of months, but it may very well be that despite it’s local popularity, it may just be ineffective as a tool.
Another point he mentioned, which I thought was really important, was the need for more Primary Research. He does a lot of investigative probing of the different statistics around Social Media and other Internet crazes — we all should be doing more of that so that when the Technocracy says “MySpace is dead” we can either affirm or refute it with hard facts.
March 16th, 2010 at 8:18 am
Hi, Becky,
It was good to meet you and hear your feedback. This kind of talk is tough because you want to reach everyone from people who are more technology savvy (like yourself) to people who want to know how to get on “Spacebook.” I thought Brad gave a nice overview of trends.
Speaking of which, if you send me your email address I will send you the results of a social media survey we did of the incoming Class of 2013 at IU East during Summer Orientation. This was an interesting group because it was the largest class in school history as well as the biggest class of Millennials; 88 percent came directly from high school. Lots of interesting numbers that helped us formulate our social media plans on campus.
John
October 7th, 2010 at 1:13 pm
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