• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, June 12, 2006

Motorola has become the latest marketer to promote a new product with MySpace, by creating its own profile page. The Motorola profile, "My Very Thin Space," hawks the new MotoQ, a sleek all-in-one personal phone that can play music, send e-mail, take photos, and record video.

The profile, created by Carat Fusion and quietly launched on June 2, had already accumulated 2,499 MySpace friends as of Friday, June 9, enticing users with futuristic wallpaper, video, animated moving type, and discussion forums about how to use the phone as well as new features.

Given all the attention focused on MySpace's sometimes racy consumer-generated media, Motorola approached the partnership with caution, according to Steve Ustaris, group media director for Carat Fusion. "The scary thing is that we don't always know what people are going to do with the site." Nonetheless, he said, "that's just how we're going to have to learn how to play in the space. We're going to have to give them a platform where they can talk about the brand and do what they want with it."

To make Motorola's move as smooth as possible, the brand's presence has been carefully segregated from areas with potential for offensive content, Ustaris explained--including ads in other areas of MySpace intended to draw consumers to the MotoQ profile: "The advertising to drive people to those sites won't run against any optional, consumer-produced content." The Motorola contract also stipulates cancellation on short notice if anything should go seriously awry with the content surrounding the phone's profile.

Even so, Ustaris said that Motorola execs took some persuading. "Obviously, at first they were a little skeptical, just because of all the negative press MySpace was getting--but we did things like having MySpace come in and explain all the preventative and reactive measures they've been taking to deal with what's been going on."

According to Ustaris, this includes not just intensive monitoring and control of immediate ad context, but site-wide initiatives aimed at increasing the general integrity of the platform, like proprietary programs for enforcing the site's minimum age limit.

The MySpace presence is one of a number of social networking initiatives for Carat clients, Ustaris added: "We're actually going to be doing something with Bolt too for Motorola." And the Motorola profile is actually the second brand Carat has brought to MySpace: a profile for Adidas was posted in anticipation of the World Cup in soccer, offering player profiles and pictures, user-generated video, blog commentary, and forums for (often passionate) discussions among team loyalists. As of Friday, June 9, that profile listed 13,135 "friends."

Jonathan Blum contributed to this story.