• by Karl Greenberg , September 9, 2008

A panel at Monday's PMA Digital Marketing Summit in New York tackled social media. But its biggest conundrum seemed to be this: Which is better, Facebook or MySpace? Actually, everyone pretty much agreed that MySpace is out, Facebook is in.

 

Kwasi Asare, head of new media for Bad Boy Entertainment, said the Sean Combs conglomerate is seeing people migrating to the latter. "I would say that my marketing is focused on cracking the Facebook puzzle," he said. "People are using it as a social networking tool, while MySpace is ... annoying."

Hooman Radfar, CEO and co-founder of Clearspring, a digital marketing company that centers on widgets as an ad platform, says that while he agrees that there's a migration away from MySpace, "it is still relevant from a viral perspective. It is still huge, but there's segmentation where a lot of people are viewing Facebook as a utility."

Marshall Sponder, senior Web analyst with Monster Worldwide, said social media sites like Facebook are serving as replacements for personal Web sites. "But," he added, "there has not been a lot of return on advertising yet. I think what's really holding it back is the need for social networks to become ubiquitous."

Both Sponder and Radfar said the wide adoption of so-called "cloud computing" will make social media sites ubiquitous. Radfar used a program called Mint as an example. Mint is an online financial tool that requires a certain level of trust among those uploading personal banking data. "When it launched, it didn't think anyone would ever use it."

When Asare said that advertisers considering placement on Bad Boy social media properties were balking because there's no way to control the content on social pages where ads might appear, Sponder said that's the nature of the biz. "They are not in control; you can't change that, but can monitor and moderate it."

Asare said the fact that "sexy" brands--e.g., personalities, films, fashion and music (Bad Boy's stock in trade)--garner the best response rates in social media environments amounts to an opportunity for more prosaic brands. "The music industry is hurting for new revenue streams. Non-sexy with sexy music content. From my perspective, those are the deals I'm looking for."