As I mentioned in my previous post about marketing on MySpace, one of the critical factors of success is having “Friends”.

Here are a couple of success stories I thought I’d point out. First, consider the various flavors of Apple’s iPod Nano that are on MySpace, such as the Pink Nano, which is enjoying a meteoric rise in Friendship status. I started tracking Pink Nano on October 15, when it had 1,500 MySpace friends. A week later, on October 22, it had climbed to 7,449 friends. Now, on October 27, I see it’s up to 37,070 friends! Not a bad marketing job, Apple!

Now consider the ‘comeback king’ of musical parody — “Weird Al” Yankovic. I remember “Weird Al” from when I was a kid; he’s been around for decades! Now he’s using social media quite successful to help breathe new life into his 27-year-long music career — thanks, in no small part, to YouTube and MySpace. Yankovic told Reuters/Billboard in a recent interview that he had accumulated 155,000 MySpace friends since he joined the site in July — all of which he had personally added. He stated, “I used to be a little pickier. Now I just kind of click as fast as I can.” (I can only imagine the RSI from that much clicking!) Here’s the kicker: it’s now just a week after this article came out, and he’s already up to 219,033 friends!

Clearly, Apple and Weird Al are making it on MySpace. Any other MySpace success stories you’d like to contribute? Talk back!

I had an article published last week on marketing on MySpace in last week’s issue of DM News. It hasn’t been posted to DMNews.com yet (hopefully shouldn’t be too much longer), but if you’re desperate to read it, you can download the 20 megabyte PDF of last week’s issue. Or, you can just wait and I’ll post a notice to my blog when my article makes into into DM News’ online article library.

As part of my research for this article, I interviewed Michael Boldin at Pugster, which is an online retailer of Italian charms and other jewelry that’s had great success using MySpace to generate traffic and sales. Michael is a member of the online marketing team at Pugster. They chose their mascot, a pug dog, as the subject of their MySpace profile, which I think is really clever. They built up their MySpace page to a very respectable 8,053 friends. Here’s what Michael had to say about marketing on MySpace:

• It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the sheer numbers on MySpace — and important to try to focus on marketing to the “right” group for your product or service — otherwise you’ll be spending a LOT of time on people who will never be interested in you.
• But, on the other hand, when starting off, you need to get friends. It’s kind of a bragging right on MySpace. If you have too few friends, it’ll be tough to get the good ones — you know, the ones that will end up buying from you. So, before you go after those, get a few hundred “bad” friends — bands are the easiest. They’ll give you a respectable number on your friend list, and will leave comments on your page — giving a little realism boost to your profile – making friend adding of the “good” ones that much easier.
• Where else could we find a place to actually build relationships with people — who may or may not have heard of us before. We spend time daily emailing people, and guess what, they email back. It becomes the ultimate soft-sell tool.
• Patience. Without a huge brand presence, don’t expect to turn profits. The only investment is your time. As long as you regularly give people something interesting — blogs, music, and other tidbits that AREN’T related to your business — then you’ll develop enough trust for them to be interested in what you DO sell.
• Keep it personal — talk with the people as if you’d email a new friend. Say hi, get to know them, and they’ll want to get to know you. If you try to sell, sell, sell, you’ll have a hard time earning respect on MySpace.
• As far as layouts, there’s a few “schools of thought” — one says make it fancy and high end, but the other, and seemingly more successful one, says simplicity is best. Since people are browsing through so many profiles with the same layout, they look for certain features in certain places. If you move too many things around, you’ll frustrate your visitors and they’ll leave. Period. Just like a good e-commerce site.
• Also, if there’s anything a “seasoned” MySpace user hates is a slow page; and the site has loads of slow loaders. You may get friends with a lot of stuff on your page, but they won’t actually spend the time to interact with you.

Some great advice. Thanks, Michael!

UPDATE: It’s been another 7 days, and Weird Al has gained another 24,000 MySpace friends (up to 243,221). Wow!