• by David Goetzl  @dgoetzl, December 11, 2008

A MySpace executive suggested this week that using lawyers to shut down unauthorized, consumer-generated fan sites on the social network is a grave mistake. Instead, marketers should look to engage the creators and turn them into brand evangelists.

An example could come with sites for Pillsbury Doughboy or Green Giant set up by individuals who admire the icons. Those people may have a mass number (well into the thousands) of "friends" or fellow fans linked with their MySpace locales.

General Mills, which markets both brands, might be concerned about preservation of band equity. But Jay Stevens, MySpace's vice president of international online marketing, said marketers should embrace the opportunity to turn the site operators into potential influencers.

"The best thing to do is empower those individuals as much as possible and engage with them," Stevens said at MediaPost's Email Insider Summit in Park City, Utah.

Marketers could contact the unauthorized site operators and offer them a chance to run a quasi-official site. They could be offered incentives, Stevens said, to serve as the center of a viral community, offering recommendations and other positive commentary to their network of MySpace "friends"--and even directing people to the official brand site.

"They're happy to do it," said Stevens, who works with clients on how to capitalize on unapproved fan sites. "They like the attention and notoriety that comes with being a brand ambassador."

In addition to the potential influence that could come from what appears to be a non-corporate evangelist, the tactic can serve as low-cost marketing.

Stevens was joined on the panel by Karla Venell, the manager of database and email marketing at General Mills, who said "most of the (fan sites are) probably good for us." But she said she's still unclear about the ideal way to take advantage of them.

Certainly, large corporations like General Mills harbor concern about their brand images floating around in an uncontrolled fashion on the Web.

But Stevens said that while companies could use attorneys to shutter the unofficial sites, they would essentially face a Sisyphean task--when one site comes down, another is sure to go up. Worse, the corporate aggressiveness could turn site operators against a company or brand, and they might respond with their own negative campaigning.

"If a site is shut down, (a person) will create a new site that says I hate the Pillsbury Doughboy," Stevens said, adding that companies no longer have much control of their brands anyway.

Loren McDonald, vice president for industry relations at Silverpop, who moderated the panel, said: "If you go after (a fan), then you're going to turn a brand proponent against you and if they have a large following that (group) can be turned against you."

Stevens said an example of a marketer making a mistake in not embracing an opportunity was the move to shut down the Scrabulous application on Facebook.

"It's completely absurd that they went and took the super-aggressive route," he said.

Separately, General Mills' Venell said the company is using both MySpace and Facebook partly to build their list of email contacts, as well as subscribers to their seven newsletters, which include recipe suggestions and the like.

A Betty Crocker fan page on Facebook serves to promote the brand, but also has a call to action that allows visitors to click through and opt to receive a newsletter.