MySpace is so last year
I just spoke with a friend of mine who is a youth leader in his church, and he happened to mention that he joined Facebook to better communicate with the teens he works with. Apparently, when he notified the youth group members via e-mail about upcoming events, no one would come. Turns out that the teens (at least at his church) aren’t checking e-mail anymore; to reach them, he needed to communicate with them through Facebook.
When asked if any of the teens were on MySpace, he scoffed, “No. MySpace is passé to them now.”
Associations interested in reaching out to young people might need to adjust their plans …
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Comments
Anyone using these social networks for marketing needs to have a presence on each of them. As they rise and fall in popularity groups of people migrate between them. There will be a steady group that retains their original ground due to connections for groups/communities.
Take the time to establish yoursellf on Facebook, Myspace, Livejournal, and YahooGroups if you really want to have a presence 'out there'. I'm sure there are more/other social networks, but the sheer numbers of participants in these is immense.
Posted by: Samantha Spears, CAE | March 9, 2007 4:37 PM
A possible lesson from this -- Without something to bring a user back again and again (e.g., compelling content), when the coolness factor is gone, you're gone too.
Simply connecting people -- though important -- will never be enough to make these services a core part of our business as associations.
We just released our own "eCommunity" service to a group of beta testers in our membership. This is a true exeriment; we have no idea where it will fall on the flop/success spectrum. So we have adopted as our motto something in this month's Business 2.0 magazine:
Launch, listen, improve, launch again.
Posted by: Frank Fortin, Massachusetts Medical Society | March 9, 2007 5:15 PM
I have heard (and found it true among my own nieces and nephews) that email doesn't connect, but cell phone text messages do. So that might be another thing to consider.
Posted by: Joanne Lozar Glenn | March 12, 2007 8:33 AM