Media using MySpace profiles to connect with youth, market their content, increase SEO

Steve Outing mentioned recently that Spokane’s 7 (The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington’s entertainment-y, youth-y brand) has a MySpace page to promote the section.

Online publisher Ken Sands of the newspaper explains: “It’s our way of joining the social network of local musicians (and a jillion other young people).”

Very smart. If you’re a local newspaper, you don’t have to spend all your effort trying to compete with MySpace for the attention of young people. Spend some effort joining in and taking advantage of what MySpace can do for you.

I’ve considered this and “in theory” I support it. But I’m very hesitant because I’m not sure if I could be … that guy. You know.. the guy who wears the t-shirt of the band he’s about to see? Something about it just seems pathetic (not that Spokane or anyone that does this is pathetic).

It just feel weird. But evidently it works.

Cameron Olthuis recently discussed using MySpace to optimize yourself for SEO 2.0 and Marketing 2.0:

Wendy’s recently created a profile on MySpace for that square hamburger character from their television commercials. This character ended up with 90,000 friends shortly after joining the MySpace community and got the eyes of thousands, if not millions of people. Wendy’s was able to get this many eyes for absolutely no charge and also got coverage from bloggers and journalists for this.

Can you imagine what this did for their search engine optimization? I bet they’ll get at least 25,000 – 50,000 backlinks from doing this. Good links too. Links from authorative blogs, news sites, and other places that they’ll show up in natural content.

And then there’s that whole MySpace thing… I won’t deny it. I have a personal account.. but it’s mainly for scanning for new features and interactivity. I swear. I don’t want to become one of … those people.

To experiment with this.. I’ve created a Journerdism profile. Feel free to add me as a friend. I will totally add you.

(BTW: Rupert and Tom need to buy some more servers. It took half an hour to create that freakin’ profile!)