Mike Abasov

As mentioned on Mashable, the new MySpace is trying to get out of the battle with Facebook and move towards entertainment, the area where the rival is minimally established. But here’s a problem. The new niche means new competitors like established Last.fm or brand new Ping.

So the question is, “Does MySpace have what it takes to win this market?” I think it does. At least, it has 3 particular advantages:

1. It is about free content. Not like monetized Ping. And it’s a lot about indie art too. If the company is able to hold on to indie musicians and filmmakers, it might win. But if it goes after big entertainment brands looking for big money, it will loose. After all, Apple has much stronger connections with recording labels.

2. It seams to have learned the lessons. The rebranding looks fresh, and I can see some ideas taken from many other successful projects (like badges from Foursquare). The fact that MySpace admits that it has lost to Facebook and adjusts its strategy deserves respect too.

3. It is pre-established. Unlike many newcomers to the market, MySpace has audience and has reputation. It has fans. The goal now is not to loose them but leverage their influence and grow.

Well, I can just wish good luck to the new MySpace (and r.i.p., the new Digg).

What do you think? Yay or nay to this rebranding?

Starbucks. Love it.

Safeway Starbucks. Looks like a Starbucks. But not quite a Starbucks. It just doesn’t feel right: the quality, the service, the level, everything in not the same.

In my humble opinion, franchising and licensing your brand like this might be good in terms of revenues, but is no good in terms of branding. It creates inconsistencies, which ruin all emotions accumulated throughout the years of great performance.

Be consistent.

This post is a part of the “Twitter Monitoring Series.”

There is no brand that people don’t talk about on Twitter. You might not know it yet, but it is most probable that there are at least few tweets that mention your company or products, and you can you these tweets to get profit (not only in terms of money but also relationships and exposure).

There are 3 good techniques that can help you set up super-effective streams in HootSuite:

1. Search for your brand name. Search for your company’s name, your products’ names and your public people’s names. Use Twitter Search Operators like “OR” to combine different variations of the names in one stream.
2. Search for common misspellings. Sometimes people will misspell your name, but it doesn’t mean you have to loose those tweets. Search for common misspellings to get much more results and combine them in one stream to save space. For example, here are 2 different ways to search for Starbucks and 2 different results that you get:
   
   Note: Usually, it is not the best idea to correct misspellings of the people you don’t know, so I don’t advise you to tell every single person how to spell your brand name correctly. 
3. Search for you domain name. This wouldn’t work for everyone, but sometimes it is good to search for your domain name. Sometimes, people won’t write your name but will give a link to your website, and if your domain name is different from your company’s name, you can search for it too. On the image below, I’ve highlighted 2 tweets that would not have showed up in a regular “hootsuite” search stream: 
    
4. Specify language. Sometimes you might want to see only tweets in English. In this case, add “a” or “the” to the query which are distinctive elements of the language. 
5. Monitor the customers. Create a list of your customers and a tab with their tweets. See what they are interested in and get into discussions.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about monitoring your topic, so don’t forget to come by!