Dirty Tricks - Part 2: Snakes and Adders

 In our last post about Nicky Kallongis' book Myspace Music profit Monster we investigated  Myspace as a hosting solution and method for reaching more listeners.  Nicky talked about using Friend Adders as a way of generating more "faans" annd exposure on myspace.

We decided we would give it a go for a short while and report back with our results.  Myspace has some strict rules about using Friend adders - specifically you cannot invite more than 350-400 a day or they will delete your profile.  In practice about 50-75 a day is the safe limit for friend adding.

Additionally some myspace profiles don't accept invitations from bands- or their profiles are private. You can't do anything about this - just move along and look at the next person in the queue.

In order not to jeopardize any of our legitimate accounts we used an alias that i set up to release some jokey Old Skool electro tracks - Trollingforlulz. 

We did a cursory search for myspace friend adders.  When approaching these sites you have to be careful as some of the sites feature adverts which are far from work safe. The biggest Google hit was for Friendfrost - which appeared to be an online repository for people to post their ID's rather than a friend adder per se.

By Jez with No comments

Dirty Tricks: Myspace, Monsters and Profit - Part 1

The subtitle of this book is "Easy online marketing strategies to get more fans fast".  I imagine this with a plethora of exclamation marks and ones after the title.

The author, Nicky (the knife) Kalliongis is apparently a respected industry insider. Having been strategist for EMI and Time warners as well as a respected producer for Whitney Houston, Air Supply, Run DMC, Faithless, Hall and Oats and Eros Ramazotti (there's more of those ones and excalamation marks). Now that in itself makes the whole premise of this book somewhat suspect to me - surely this is one of the very dinosaurs blindly struggling through the web 2.0 tar pits?

The book comes across as severely dated and very basic for everyone who's got any familiarity with the web. Some of the marketing actions such as using a newswire service like PR Web strike me as the actions of someone who doesn't really understand the viral buzz they keep talking about.

That the whole marketing plan centres around myspace, a now almost defunct medium is enough to get the alarm bells ringing.

Even when the book was intially released (2008) myspace was already on it's last legs ready for a kindly shotgun in the face care of Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp who took something they didn't understand and made it even worse filling it's pages with advertising and slow clunky loading applications such as Myspace chat and yet more adverts.

By Jez with 1 comment