On Social Media Platforms & Doing it Virally

On the Momentum Conference's panel around social media networks at the Computer History Museum on Thursday, Accel Partner’s Kevin Efrusy talks about FaceBook versus MySpace.

MySpace is all about expressing yourself and FaceBook is about reaching out and meeting people. Says CNET’s Martin Green who is moderating the panel, “I think the Fox TV guys would argue that MySpace is a communications vehicle, as well as a place for self-expression.

They discuss social media platforms in general and getting the word out virally. Not every platform can turn into a MySpace overnight. Says Piczo’s Jeremy Verba, “the classic model is that you pay for content, you pay to market it and then you have the costs of distributing it. It is not that you don’t have content costs in viral models, but it is substantially less. You have to give users really good and simple tools to make that happen.”

He continues, “create your environment and make it really dead simple for your users to upload photos, video, whatever it is. Make it so easy they will want to do more on the site, create more, and tell their friends to do the same. Invite people in and encourage people to participate with you and build those tools to make that happen.”

The pivot point is around the individual users. When a user has created something and then links to nine or ten other sites, activity really spikes, and things start to really take off. It is not site-life; it is individualized, i.e., a lot of private parties going on.

Adds Pandora’s Jessica Stoner, “Pandora is now on the client too, so you do not have to download anything. Within one click of a mouse, music is already playing. We give something to the user first before they invest something and it has taken off.

We had early interactions with the blogosphere, which took off for us virally. We fan those flames with bloggers by creating widgets they can integrate into their blogs. We are catering to them, so the word will continue to spread. Our founder also talks to users and solicits their feedback.”

Café Press’ Fred Durham talks about their marketing. “The hard part of marketing is finding what things have growth potential. Identify what they are and spend your time, money and resources there. You need to really listen to users and take your own ego out of it.”