Case Study: iPrioritize MySpace Marketing

One of the things that I want to share more with you guys is some of the specific successes and failures that I incur, because I think you can learn more from specifics than when I generalize. I also think that many of you can offer a different perspective on things and probably leave some great feedback that will help me in the future. So every once in a while I'm going to try to break down the good and the bad of something I did with one of my businesses.

When I launched iPrioritize, I knew right away that I needed to go after a different market than the "web2.0/AJAX" crowd. You can spend your entire life in the techsphere (discussed more here) and never really go after the customers that will appreciate their product the most.

One of the target markets for iPrioritize is students - they have a lot of things that they need organized, they are the future business leaders, and if they really like something it can virally spread like wildfire. And where do students hang out? MySpace. So I decided to create a profile for the i-Guy, the letter "i" in the iPrioritize logo (which took about a day to make, messing around with MySpace's horrible, horrible code).



Knowing that if I put too much effort into promoting iPrioritize, people would see the i-Guy profile as an advertisement and ignore it, I set out to appeal to the college crowd. I took some photos of my friends and I and photoshopped the i-Guy into them. I started a blog where people can ask the i-Guy questions about anything. Most importantly, I started putting up a "Video of the week" that I get from YouTube.

Here's some vital info:

• To rapidly add friends, I bought a copy of Badder Adder for $47.
  
• I only send friend requests to college students (MySpace limits you to around 500/day).
  
• Each week I send an automated "Happy Birthday" message to anyone whose birthday is in the coming week. The birthday message is an image that links to iPrioritize (free advertising) and also has the "i" in birthday as the i-Guy.
  
• The only other mass-contact that I have with my friends is a weekly bulletin announcing the new video.
• I only mention iPrioritize with one big link on the profile page (and some mentions at the end of blog posts).
  

Here are the vital numbers as of yesterday:

• Date started: 8/7/2006
• MySpace profile views: 24,553
• MySpace buddies: 6,262
• Direct visits to iPrioritize: 822
• Direct iPrioritize sign ups (free accounts): 123

At first glance, one would be disappointed because of the only 123 sign ups. But I am REALLY encouraged by the fact that I have over 6,000 buddies. That means that people like my pictures, my profile, and the videos I post. That is HUGE. I am building a massive community that I can leverage for other things (more in a moment). I also don't mean to neglect the positive branding. A LOT of people have at least seen the i-Guy, and that's a good thing for iPrioritize long term.

Another great thing (not reflected in those stats) are the two press mentions that this got me in college newspapers (Bowling Green and Elon). I've estimated around 100 more sign ups directly from those articles.

Where do I go from here? This is where I'm hoping for some help from you guys, but here's what I've come up with:

• Keep doing what I'm doing. It's resulting in sign ups (although less than I'd like for the traffic) and more importantly resulting in building a massive network of buddies.
• Tweak SOMETHING on the page to try to increase traffic to iPrioritize (without turning people off). My first thought is an iPrioritize screenshot of the application, although that very well might turn people off so I'm going to have to consider it some more.
  
• Start leveraging my big group of buddies. The first thing I want to do is start selling i-Guy shirts (through CafePress), with half of the proceeds going to charity. The shirts (I'm thinking about a new one each month) would have slogans like "i am smart" and "i am sexy" and "i am wasted" using the i-Guy as the letter "i"...and I'll try to sneak the iPrioritize URL on there if I can. Hopefully this will help brand the i-Guy and iPrioritize, and hopefully I can get some positive PR for helping out a charity I believe in (a win-win).
  

Overall, I'm glad I ventured into MySpace. It's a tough crowd to appeal to, but if you manage to do so you can build a powerful network to market to.