Internet marketing is now all about getting people to love you.
With that in mind, one of the Internet marketing strategies I favor is creating multiple identities to invade large social networks with the intent of recruiting members to adopt your social network (note: in that past sentence, you can substitute the word "social network" for "platform" or "ecosystem" and in my opinion, it would still be true).
Anyway, with that in mind, I created another MySpace account specifically for targeting musicians.
Here it is, if you want to friend me. As that is musician-oriented, non-musician requests will likely be rejected (there are some rare exceptions). I'll be creating MySpace identities on a regular basis, so don't worry: I'm sure we will ultimately have some shared interest. After all, in real life, you have something in common with just about everbody! And that Internet is here to help us learn what exactly that is -- to help us find what, and who, we love.
This is an example of what I call the "love economy" and how that changes all aspects of business. Everything is ultimately psychological now, and "psychological" is just an academic way of saying "love." Everything will be about getting customers to choose your world. And as physical assets (i.e. non-psychological, or non-love assets) get commoditized, value will shift to being able to get people to choose you. And they will only choose you if they love you (or, more sinisterly, if you get them to choose you through a mix of fear, guilt, and lies -- but that is a perversion of the intended strategy, so let us not fall for the illusion).
To get them to love you, you need to mirror them and their desires.
You need to personalize.
This is why everything is going niche, and will ultimately get personalized.
In the love economy, all roads lead to personalization.
Anyway, MySpace is really hard to use. I got no confirmations for a bunch of actions I took on the site, leaving me wondering if I did it right. That's why Craigslist, Wikipedia, and Google are still three of the best interfaces -- they are very hard to be confused by.
So, sorry if I friended someone like a million times and they got like a million notifications because of it. I just kept clicking because I didn't know if I did it right (since I didn't get confirmation!!!!)
We'll talk more about the love economy in future posts.