Monday, May 15, 2006

MySpace for enterprise

It seems that News Corp is putting together something called Fox Interactive Media, headed by the longtime manager of FoxSports.com, Ross Levinsohn. Levinsohn seems to know a thing or two:

Mr. Levinsohn calls MySpace the antiportal. “It’s not about a central hub, because that’s not where things are going,” he said. “The under-30 set wants choice. It’s not about one destination; it’s about 65 million."

The thing about this New York Times piece is that either the journalist or the Fox execs think they’ve hit upon some kind of new idea - companies conversing online with individual customers and communities.

Fox officials wonder whether this sort of commerce, built on relationships, can be extended to small businesses.

No need to wonder, Fox - there are plenty of business (large and small) doing it already, and have been for years. I and some of our event speakers have actually shown them how to do it, with great success, through business blogging. So how is News Corp going to turn a profit on this?

A Ford dealership in, say, Indiana could create a profile, said Mark A. Jung, the chief operating officer of Fox Interactive. The profiles themselves, he said, would probably be free, but MySpace would sell enhancements to help businesses attract customers and complete transactions, Mr. Jung said.

If the huge awareness of MySpace is what it takes to get more SMEs aware of the fact that even tiny sheet metal companies in deepest Lancashire can yield the rewards of online conversation with niche communities, this is something to which we’ll look forward.

That said, if those companies want to avoid the business equivalent of the MySpace teen horror stories and sensationalist scare items that have been so widely publicised to date, they might want to try to understand the etiquette of online conversations and the nature of the network before they unleash their commercial interests online. (The good news is, we’ll be covering some of this on June 21st.)

NYT story link courtesy What MySpace Means speaker Adriana Cronin-Lukas