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Once the champion of the social networking masses, MySpace has gone through many changes throughout its years as a social network. Unlike Facebook, MySpace was originally intended as a social networking platform for everyone age 13 and older (rather than being associated with a college as Facebook was originally intended). While MySpace is a great social network with a lot of bells and whistles, its pop culture roots limit its viability for many organizations.
Businesses that primarily benefit from using MySpace include non-profits and charities, social awareness groups, social media groups, companies geared towards teens and college students, and fashion music companies. While there are likely other businesses that might also have a place on MySpace (such as advertising agencies or talent agencies), the crowd that MySpace generally draws is not the same crowd one would expect from Linkedin. As a technology trend, social networks and software are able to provide tools to companies seeking customizations on social networks such as MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin.
The simple answer is no. While MySpace is a great social network tool to promote organizations from multiple industries, it is not a right fit for many professional groups. The key concern with MySpace when used by businesses is that its origins are pop-culture-based and have a strong relationship to videos and music.
While MySpace has a competitively populated user base and ever-improving tools and functionality, it is difficult to size up to social networks like Facebook that have origins based on college student and alumni-exclusivity. But that does not mean that MySpace is not a great tool for other promotional purposes related to business; it is simply a matter of getting around the not-so-business-friendly signup process.
The first less-than-useful aspect of MySpace for businesses is that it requires a gender. While this is great for targeted advertising, it does not work for businesses that wish to remain asexual. (***MySpace should even consider the fact that it might be a good idea to offer differentiation between businesses and individuals to offer a broader range of advertisement targeting available--it just makes more sense). Unfortunately, the gender and age hurdle are the two things that MySpace puts as compulsory for creating an account.
It is not helpful if you are a new organization under 13 years old (because you need to be at least age 13 to use MySpace) and of course you don't want your company to be classified as under age 18 (that is a whole new issue that is not worth the hassle). To play it safe, use a birth date over age 18 (unless you are a very old company--go ahead and put the real company birthday!). Once we are past this hurdle, then we get to the tweaking and usability aspect: prepping the modules for business use.
MySpace has quite a few great modules that are geared toward individuals, but businesses can also implement their own modules, such as the ASPCA, which implemented a fundraiser donor module to allow users to give money to the non-profit organization (yet another of the reasons why MySpace is useful for non-profits).
The music and entertainment industries are a shoe-in to use MySpace, but there are some stretches that would be relative to the business itself, such as information technology firms, advertising firms, educational institutions, etc.
Some of the features that MySpace provides the ability to include a link back to the company website and advertise events on the MySpace homepage calendar. There is also a high degree of customization possible using MySpace, which allows companies to create profiles that match with the look and feel of the official website.
Are there any other options to creating a company profile on MySpace?
One in particular comes to mind: create a profile for the company head or someone who is similar to a "spokesperson" for the company (it could even be a company mascot of sorts). Bill Gates and Steve Jobs would be examples of great figureheads to an organization that would be great for MySpace accounts. The only trick is ensuring a separation of the personal identity of the individual with the way in which they represent the organization through MySpace.
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