President from MySpace shares his vision

On the first Wednesday of this month, Tim Burrowes of Mumbrella chaired the MySpace hosted event featuring Michael Jones (Co-President, MySpace) to discuss ‘The Future of Social Media’ – yes everyone thought that was ironic – but I went away with a more positive perception of this social-music-media-platform-thing.

I went to this event with a dull memory of using MySpace and full of wonder as to what this dying giant had to say about the future. I wasn’t alone. Most people I asked, kinda laughed and said “Yea, I used to use it, but I couldn’t imagine going there again, and we don’t buy media with them…”

Although I’m not totally in love with MySpace now, there are definitely some important messages that their Co-President had to get out, and they were well crafted and simple.

• 200,000 new users/month globally
• In top 10 websites in the world
• Serves 1 B impressions/month in Australia
• Reaches 2 M people/month in Australia
• See’s itself as a content discovery engine – helping you find music
• Facebook is more like an email engine
• MySpace & Facebook are in no way competition
• Is implementing features that work from Facebook
• They acknowledge the site needs major improvement
• Mike Jones is a well grounded and balanced dude, very approachable
• The underlying message – We’re big and not going anywhere

My main take away – keep an eye on them (login every now and then), consider MySpace if you’re targeting youth audiences or want to align with music – they reach 2M users a month, not the monolith that is Facebook, but no laughing matter either.