3foldComm

It’s been a while since I’ve heard the name MySpace without snickering.

However, all of a sudden, the brand that was the last big thing is making an aggressive effort to claim a new place in the social media sphere once again.

I’d pretty much written off the site, even with its somewhat niche with the music industry. Then I heard “Glee”, the hit musical show on Fox, had set up a page on MySpace, allowing amateur and professional performers ages 16 and older the opportunity to submit an audition video on the site though April 26. Have to admit, the campaign peaked my interest.

We’re big fans of the show here at 3fold. So, invoking the basic rules of high school which say hanging with the cool kids automatically ups your cool points, MySpace may be flirting with relevancy.

Building on this effort to reemerge as a social media player, MySpace is now vying for top billing on its users’ social calendars.

Late on Wednesday, the social networker unveiled MySpace Events, a calendar and ticketing platform allowing artists and fans to create and share events. This service blends nearly 1 million concert listings with a calendar and new links to buy tickets from partners or artists. Other pop culture events such as movie debuts and album releases are expected to appear on the calendar as well. Events appear inside the user’s MySpace calendar, even tying in any Facebook events thanks to a growing implementation of Facebook Connect. They can then be shared on their MySpace Streams, Facebook pages, Twitter, and via tiny url.

Users can add or subtract which events they see on their personal calendars on MySpace by clicking on categories such as music or friends’ events. They even could list or remove events they were notified of on Facebook, the rival social networking giant. Listings can even be tailored to a user’s favorite artists and location.

The new feature takes advantage of MySpace’s $20 million acquisition last year of iLike, a popular music application that also runs in Facebook, and blends it with Social Plan, an event application that was absorbed by MySpace in January. Social Plan was also a unit of News Corp.

For marketers, the new project also creates a channel for advertising that MySpace desperately needs. The site is selling event listings that will show up prominently on users’ calendars and profile pages. Walmart is already using it to prome an event to sell merchandise that goes with DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc.’s latest movie, “How To Train Your Dragon.”

Myspace says in the coming months it will continue to add additional features, including mobile access, concert notifications and film releases.

Will you use MySpace Events? What do you think it will take to make MySpace truly relevant again?

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The Winter Olympics are a bit odd. Skiing combined with shooting? Sliding rocks around with brooms? Hockey? These are not sports that usually captivate Americans. Well, maybe the ski-gun thing if it was a developing story on CNN, but not really in a healthy competition kind of way.

What the Winter Olympics lack in warm-weathered sports I understand, they more than make up for in frosty tech, making the 2010 Vancouver games a wonderful example of the plethora of multimedia options available to us marketing nerds. Yes, NBC’s TV coverage borders on the pathetic. Who cares? Traditional broadcasting is so 20th century. Keeping real-time tabs on the international festival of ice sports has gone uber-social, and NBC is attempting a gold medal performance for its audiences (see what I did there?).

Of course there’s live streaming on www.nbcolympics.com (although, more often of the less popular events, NBC saves the “good” stuff for their TV broadcasts. Lame.). The site also includes athlete interviews, previews, recaps, and photos of every sport.

Beyond that, however, the popularity of social media has made way for a delightful cornucopia for feeding Olympic obsession. Looking for more personal information, or more information in general? There’s  live blogging, sports history, and terms and jargon definitions. They’ve even hooked up athletes who are tweeting and blogging their experiences as they happen.

Socially, NBC offers RSS feed updates, updates from Twitter and Facebook, mobile and email alerts, and even embeddable widgets for streaming video on your own sites.

Want to stalk the Olympians on the go? There’s an app for that. For the iPhone, there’s an official NBC Olympics app and a CTVOlympics.ca app. There’s also apps for Android and WebOS, but rumor has it, they’re unofficial and a bit lackluster.

While far from perfect in both technical and program components (a little figure skating scoring reference there), so far the 2010 Winter Olympics are a large-scale example of the numerous possibilities available for combining media and events. Sure, one could argue NBC’s efforts border on the overwhelming (i.e. desperate), offering far too many elements to be truly effective, but there’s still valuable lessons to be learned.

Creative event planning, even without an Olympic-sized budget, can utilize a variety of integrated media strategies to create a memorable experience for your own organization’s events.

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