Online Social Network Wars: MySpace’s New Weapons

We have seen 2 of the biggest Social Networks fighting the social network market, each focusing on certain features to gain more members. I’ve featured recently that they’re currently in wars in the mobile phone market, and now MySpace is showing their new weapon in their war, ‘Married on MySpace‘  section. It’s almost a contest where people would submit their wedding proposals (by April 17th, 2009) to MySpace and whoever wins will have their wedding featured on MySpace. What’s really unique about it…

… is that it’s not just a normal wedding but rather a crowdsourced wedding. A crowdsourced wedding is a wedding that is planned by millions of users in MySpace and is all recorded as a reality TV show. Crowdsourcing is a good way for MySpace to gain viral marketing as when members contribute they do feel a certain part of ownership and thus promotes more on word of mouth. With millions of members in their website, MySpace will surely increase time spent by members on the website, as well as, getting more members (thru exposure) to their website (with an anticipation of increase in internet users by 40% worldwide).

This is a unique move that MySpace in their campaign, they’ve done it to partner (advertiser) with the movie called “The Proposal”, which seems to be one of their ways to monetize their website. As Facebook struggles to monetize their website, MySpace seems to be doing a great job doing more effective marketing schemes with its advertisers and being able to convert.

This is what I believe where MySpace is doing right, being able to monetize while making their members enjoy and interact more, as opposed to, Facebook’s recent negative publicity on their Terms of Service (TOS) and their new design. With both Social Network moving towards new functions, Facebook seems to be forgetting the basics of web 2.0 which is the crowd. If this continues MySpace might be able to regain the number 1 position in the Social Network wars.