On Tuesday night we went to a Q&A with myspace. They now have an office in Stockholm. Apart from introducing their new developer platform, they were talking about the importance of local presence. Even though many talks about the “alarming” decrease of interest in Facebook and myspace, I don’t think we are going to see that. But I think these players need to adjust themselves to the next phases of how we are going to use these social networks. They need to go local, as they are doing. Or rather they need to make it possible to maintain and develop the users’ local presence or community. The ability to act locally is still very important if you look at networking, and actually the possibilities to work in a creative manner. At myspace I’ve been friend now with loads of prominent people, but now I want combine my digital networking possibilities to take part of a real, local, and creative community. 

What about your local presence from a business perspective?

The social networks are definitely excellent tools to evolve your local presence; communicate and strenghten your brand. But they’re still just one small path on the road of marketing communication. But a very effective.

The overall web presence for local companies is still left a bit behind though, and I think It’s very important to try to adjust your channels of communication to the users behaviour; i.e. increase and improve your web presence.

Obviously there might an economical threshold for a small company, but it might also be a case of prioritising your marketing budget and working on the marketing communications mix. If we narrow it down to a campaign activity; isn’t 200 local contacts for the local company, equivalent in value, to 200 000 for the global company?

Tags: myspace, internet marketing, campaigns, web presence, social media,