The Wayne's World Business Model

I'M LIKE THAT. WHERE'S MY MILLION FANS?

An unknown named Sandi Thom just signed a big record deal after 21 nights of live performances webcast from her basement.

By the end of her "gig" she was drawing 100,000 listeners a night. How did they find out about her? MySpace. Only two years old, it has 72 million members.

THE NEXT MYSPACE

According to a breathless Anya Kamenetz, the future of business lies in viral marketing through online social networks and TAGWORLD is a likely model.

It offers every feature currently available and a lot of easy-to-access marketing feedback.

Musicians who post their music and videos online will be rewarded with demographics on exactly who is listening and where.

Bloggers will see exactly which other members are reading them, and advertisers, once there are some, will be able to find out similar information.

That kind of supermuscular data and easy, automatic feedback makes TagWorld's platform even more potentially valuable to businesses than the current generation of social networks.

"Businesses can have a lot of data without putting the work into it," adds TagWorld boss, Evan Rifkin. (His partner is Freddie Kreuger. Seriously.)

FOR RECRUITING

I haven't seen any recruiters raving about MySpace. Maybe because they're not recruiting teenagers. Most of us focus on LinkedIn.

But will something more be needed to find and market to the candidates of the future, the YouTube Generation?

MUST READ

Exceler8ion offers an interesting answer supported by field research.

Source: The Network Unbound, Anya Kamenetz in Fast Company.
More on Viral Marketing. Telecrunch on TagWorld.

Comments

[Pete Altieri]

"If you don like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less." -General Eric Shinseki,Chief of Staff. U.S. Army

LinkedIn model of today vs a year ago- drastically different.

YouTube a year ago- still in servers for the most part in a warehouse with 3 tech guys.

MySpace....same....

College community viral success model: check out http://www.facebook.com and now accepting ..guess.....company employee groups....

Think forward a year from now....it will be drastically different....again...the cycle times are quickening and this YouTube generation is far more tech versed than any other group over the past ten years.

Good example....NCAA athetics imposing rules and regulations on how many times they can email...and now "IM" for recruiting purposes.Savvy recruiters knew that every school would send emails, but the good ones had screen names and IM'd all night long until the NCAA (or mom and dad) said knock it off. But the kids being recruited; they loved it; personal, cool and hey, this person really is a person, not Coach Smith at U of X.

Didnt think I'd see it coming, but Microsoft and the new "People Ready" offerings are the latest "mass" example. This video (a little long) drives the point home from my perspective. http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/videos/greatestasset.asx

Now, this kind of innovation.. below (picture)..well...,its New York. What do you expect :) http://tompeters.com/entries.php?note=008901.php

Tom Peters thinks its cool...who would have thought. Then again, this YouTube generation, "Tom Who?".

[Chris Taylor]

I know us dinosaurs who actually have to get dressed and go outside the house to go to work are drastically unhip and due to become extinct any nanosecond now, but I'm more in tune with Matthew Ingram's skeptical take at the Globe and Mail (get the Google News freebie version here http://news.google.ca/news?hl=en&ned=ca&ie=UTF-8&q=source%3Aglobe_and_mail+%22Social+networks+are+hot%2C+but+where%27s+all+the+cash%3F%22&btnG=Search+News)

For every YouTube success story there's a dozen iCraveTV flameouts.

[Colin Kingsbury]

One of the best things that ever happened to Rupert Murdoch was when Pointcast told him to go fish after he (allegedly) offered to buy them for $450m, which when adjusted for inflation seems to be what he paid for MySpace. "Push" did turn out to be a huge success after all but in the form of non-proprietary RSS feeds, not Pointcast's closed network.

My suspicion is that social networking is a feature, not a product, and all of the things that make MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. successful are already becoming part of the general-purpose stack of Internet features and will within 5-10 years be available everywhere and owned by no one in the same sense as HTTP and email. Protocols, not products, are what ultimately matters.

[Phillip]

Interesting comments thus far.

While I see the point of some of the skepticism thrown out there for all these new Web 2.0 technologies and sites, I still don't believe that things such as MySpace or LinkedIn will just fade into obscurity because they are "fads."

The only way they'll fade into obscurity is if something bigger and better comes along.

Which will happen inevitably.

...all this makes me agree with Murakami Teruyasu of the Nomura Research Institute when he says we're shifting from an Age of Information Intensification to more of an Age of Creation Intensification. The proliferation of beta sites, services, and/or products all over the Internet should indicate that much.

I'll be very interested to see how organizations evolve in their thinking and approach towards recruiting for this "YouTube" generation. Just like marketing, employers better be prepared to speak the same language as the people they're trying to attract...or risk watching as competitors swipe up all the talent.

In the nature of the new age we live in, it'll be the organizations that CREATE the best experiences, solutions, and services (for candidates, that is) that end up winning this war for talent (we can debate whether this is really happening or not at a later time ;)