Insider's Guide to Viral Myspace Platforms
By Wes Unruh
Memes aren't just viral, they're fecund.
They're sexual.
They get your brain off.
You want to know why marketing works?
Take your pick:
Because laughter is an orgasm.
Because peak moments allow imprints
brought about by polarity resolutions.
I'm studying how to set up a swarm of
profiles to produce a viral platform.
Eventually I'll be distributing these ideas
enmass, and eventually the structure in
which these techniques are practiced will
be so loaded with memes and memoids
that it will mutate the culture at large.
To what end it mutates, that's still up in the air.
what follows, then, is the meat of what
I'll be packaging as a study course.
This is the insider's guide
The most effective way to ramp up your
sales is to apply viral marketing techniques
over a period of time.
Before I go on, I want to make very clear
what the words I will be using mean in the
following contexts.
An element can be a piece of marketing,
a product, an article reviewing the product,
a niche-elated update, or any other piece
of digital media available through your social
network.
When every element is announced online,
each individual element should be announced
in three seperate, yet interlinked 'places'.
The next word you will need to understand
is archetype. I'll be presenting three archtypes
that are absolutely essential to developing an
integrated viral campaign. Those archetypes
are the Maven, the Connector, and the Sales
Entity. When you are done with this course,
1
You will have a Sales Entity, which
can be you, but could as easily be
a personified logo of some sort, who
will receive the payment.
2
You will have a Connector, who you
will use to create a web presence in
a large social network.
3
You will have a Maven, who will
present and collate the very latest news
and ideas of interest to your target niche.
'Places' can be web sites, profiles, online scrapbooks,
channels, lenses, or social bookmarking tags where
you control the context and the content of what
visiting traffic will see.
One of these 'places' should be a web presence
devoted to the archetype of Maven within your target
niche. The second 'place' should be a web presence
of an archetypal entity that is a Connector within your
niche, and the last should be the web presence of a
niche Sales entity.
A Sales entity is an avatar of your company that is
enabled to receive payments from online visitors, and
who presents the social traffic with the products you
are selling. This is the entity that gets you paid.
To review, you have the Sales Entity, who can be
you, or a personified logo who completes the online
transaction. You will have a Connector, who you will
use to create a web presence in a large social network.
This is a strategy that is very malleable. Each one of
these three places should be linked to the other two.
Different elements should be highlighted by one of the
three archetypes, but should be referenced by all places
each time it enters your social net.
Before you read any further, you may wish to open up
and create a profile on myspace.com. Fill out as much
of the profile as you'd care to fill out, but be sure to
check 'Networking' when presented with the option to
do so during the sign-up session.
By the time this training is complete, you will have
created three profiles, but for now simply familiarize
yourself with the features and home page of your
profile. When you're ready, come back to this text,
and I'll bring up the three archetypes again.
Okay.
Now that you have a myspace presence, you will
realize that it leans towards one of the three archetypes.
1
A Sales Entity, which can be you, but is
charismatically inclined to complete a transaction.
2
A Connector, which is naturally aligned to create
a web presence in a large social network.
3
A Maven, who instinctively collates the very
latest news of interest to your target niche.
Whichever archetype your first Myspace profile seems
to fall into is quite probably the type of individual you
actually are, and if you are in the position to do so, you
may want to find two other individuals to assign to the
two other Myspace personas. However, this can still
be accomplished effectively by one individual, and it is
to this end that I intend to direct the rest of this training.
If you are creating a profile as a Maven, you will want
to look into creating a profile that responds in the Myspace
Forums about topics related to your niche. You will want
to direct the rss feed of your blog to your Myspace profile.
You should consider posting to your myspace blog, and
making the rss available to your own web site to generate
cross-traffic. In network and social theory, a maven is
someone who has a disproportionate influence on other
members of the network. The role of mavens in propagating
knowledge and preferences has been established in various
domains, from politics to social trends.
If your profile is that of a Connector, begin by learning to
navigate the connectiong that develop across the profiles
and linked friends. While only one in several thousand people
might be thought of as a true connector, leaving comments
that are polite and jovial is a good way to start developing
a connector profile. And as your network of friends develop,
take the time to leave positive comments on your friends
blogs on their birthdays. Over the course of a year you will
have created positive reciprocity throughout your friend
network. Respond warmly to emails you receive, and
present information from the maven and the sales profile
slowly over time.
If your profile is that of a sales-orriented archetype, you
will want to focus on presenting the narrative of your pitch.
Develop your profile as the place online which identifies
you as both an individual or as the sales entity with its
own developed persona. When the elements are all in
play, the Sales profile will be routing traffic directly to
the squeeze page or the sales page.
To understand the effect of your profile, it would be
easiest to look at a number of other profiles first, and
ask yourself what you notice, what you click on, what
draws your attention. Your profile is an aggregate of
the media you present in your place on myspace.
Remember, the quickest way to grow a vast number
of friends on myspace is to ask people to befriend you.
You don't want to alientate them when they come to
see who the stranger is that asked to befriend them.
Before you start reading much further, you will need
to have signed up for at least three Myspace.com
accounts. You should have one from earlier, so that
means make two more now.
You will need three different valid email addresses.
If you do not have multiple email addresses, I'd
advise getting one from gmail.com, or yahoo.com, or
from lycos.com. I personally like having experience in
different online email programs, and if you haven't
tried several yet this could be a good time to do so.
Regardless, you will have to have established three
Myspace.com profiles before you read any further.
PART 1
First, open two browser windows.
Now on one open:
http://mygen.co.uk/index.php?page=create
On the other open:
http://www.strikefile.com/myspace/
Either of these generators will produce CSS templates
to customize your profile on Myspace.com. I
recommend the first one at Mygen.co.uk, but not all
browsers may support this, which is why I include
links to Thomas' Myspace Editor V4.4 at Strikefile.com.
Both of these have the same primary options, so each
of the following steps are basically the same for each
profile generator. Follow the tabs as I take you through
each step. Use whichever of the two editors that appeals
to you, and sign into Myspace.com with the browser
window you aren't using so you will be able to paste
code into your profile once you finish this first part of
this session.
First you will be designing the background of your page.
If you have a file online you want to use for a background
image, then you will want to put that URL in on this tab.
If not, then select an appealing background color and
proceed to the next tab.
Second you will want to set up either your text or your
tables. In mygen.co.uk you can see the results of each
change by scrolling down, and you will be designing
your tables. In Thomas' Myspace Editor you will be
designing your text links, but you do not have the ability
to see the changes as you go along.
The third step will be to do the text links if you are
working with Mygen.co.uk, or tables if you are working
with Thomas' Myspace Editor.
Fourth, you will want to design the color of your sidebar.
Not all browsers support this option, so feel free to skip
over it. Mygen.co.uk also allows you to edit your profile
in other ways, such as hiding parts of your profile or
changing the cursor.
Fifth, click get the code. Highlight the code, and paste
it into your myspace profile:
1.
Be sure you are signed in to your Myspace profile,
then from your home page you click on 'Edit Profile.'
2.
Paste the code from the profile editor into the box
that says "About Me."
3.
Save the changes, then look at your profile to be
sure that you pasted the code properly.
Now that your code is on your first profile, repeat
this process for the other two profiles you are creating
before moving into the second part of this email.
PART 2
The second part of building a profile is adding friends
to your profile.
There are seven basic ways to find
interesting people to add to your profile.
1
Use the MySpace Search Function to locate
your target niche's prominent profiles and
then send them a friend request.
2
Once you find a few interesting profiles, look
at the comments others have left on their
profiles then add the most appropriate people,
based on the comments that they've left on
these profiles. Like-minded people will already
be networked and you can use this fact to
rapidly explore already exisiting networks
3
Learn what comments your niche seems to
respond well to from the previous step, and
begin adding comments to profiles with a note
and a link about how they can find more info
to help become familiar with your profile
4
Create ongoing dialogs with people who
already have large lists of friends. If you
notice that you are emailing with someone
or are messaging in groups with someone
who already has a large list of friends, you
should make a point of commenting on
their profile.
Your comments already provide
a link back to your profile, so this is an
excellent place to reveal elements of an ongoing
conversation to intice that profile's friendship
base to become more familiar with your
own profile.
5
Become an active participant in groups. By
becoming an active contributor in a group
devoted to your specific niche or otherwise
relevant parts of the group's overall structure,
you will draw new friends to your profile at
an ever expanding rate, while providing you
with excellent area from which to find people
to add to your own pool of friends.
6
Become prolific in myspace forums, which
is an area where questions are raised and
answered. If you can't find a question you
can answer, then ask a question. Either way,
search through the forums asking and answering
questions related to your specific niche, and
along the way you will be generating interest
in your new profile.
7
Send out invites to people who don't have
profiles yet. This is by far the easiest strategy,
and can be done quite quickly from your own
contact databases from within Myspace itself.
Along the top bar there is a link for Invite. This
link will lead you to the same screen you saw
when you first created your profile, where you
can import contact lists from your email service
and send out an email to all your contacts inviting
them to join you on myspace by building their
own profile.
Each of these steps taken by themselves is going to
dramatically place each of your three profiles into an
area of high visibility within your targeted niche. Using
all seven in tandem, well that is certainly a sure-fire way
to seed your own sub-network within myspace!
By now you have three specific profiles on myspace,
each one reflecting one of the three archetypes I outlined
previously.
In the best case scenario you have a different individual
managing each profile, but I will assume that you are
personally in charge of controlling each of these three
profiles. Remember, with Myspace you are presenting
each of these profiles as a discrete 'place' within a larger
network.
Your Connector profile should be used to bring people
into your network. Also for your Connector profile, you
want to establish a piece of code you can leave on other
profiles in the comments section for those profile's birthdays.
For a quick way to generate the html you can use a content
generator.
Open a browser window and enter this URL:
http://mygen.co.uk/index.php?page=generators§ion=content
This URL is a WYSIWYG html generator designed
especially for creating html text to put into the comments
section of myspace profiles. If you want to include images
or embeded video in a comment, you would need those
elements to be hosted online, either on your own server
or through some third party.
For your Sales profile you want to practice your copywriting
skills. Break out some copywriting templates and develop a
narrative that markets to your niche. You will also want a
different sales profile for each additional niche you seek to
cultivate.
Your Maven profile might be the easiest profile to manage
once the content is in place. The Sales profile and the
Connector both require constant attention for each product
launch, and to help the network grow. The Maven profile
simply needs to be 'in the know.' This profile can be quickly
designed using RSS feeds, by embedding video from youtube
channels, and by linking to scholarly articles or wikipedia
entries that apply to your various offers.
I would also use this profile when answering questions in the
Myspace forums that are relevant to your niche, or in making
comments on Myspace groups that reveal a knowledge base
those in your niche might value.
Here are some things that if you can imagine yourself keeping
in mind, you will find that they help clarify the role and the
information your three profiles present. Tap your gut and
intuition and work backwards from your goal for each profile.
Avoid negative feelings on your profile, carefully analyze both
the text you put in and the media you present from your profile.
Follow your bliss.
We're in this to spread memes, and this is the way they spread
most efficiently. It doesn't have to be within myspace either,
but this is the model to use in a social network setting to really
produce traction on a memeplex
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