How a deal might be struck (continued from part one)
Assuming there is a certain level of trust between the buyer and seller, there are a few ways a deal can be made and a few questions to be addressed before the transfer is made. Will the buyer maintain the seller’s identity after purchase? To what extent is the buyer allowed to act as the seller when they acquire the account? Consider:

• Display name
• Personal pictures
• Existing blogs
• Existing comments
• A list of friends exempt of being solicited personally

An agreement between a buyer and seller can be structured in any way. The possibilities are really up to the parties’ imaginations. Here are some other facts and ideas to be kept in mind when arriving at an agreement.

1. Keeping a seller’s pictures up can help to ensure that friends don’t delete the account after the transfer. It is common behavior to aggregate existing friends and not pay much attention to minor profile changes when the potential “deleter” has a long friend list and only interacts with a few people with regularity. As a buyer, don’t raise any flags by putting up an unlikely photo or doing anything else that might be suspect behavior, like bulletin spam.

2. The seller can change their account email address. They’ll no longer be found if someone searches based on email. It may, however, take weeks for the email to be removed from the search results.

3. One can enable an away message thus disabling new incoming messages if desired.

4. One can require a last name to add you as a friend (which can be changed to something not obviously guessable) if the seller does not want new real life friends finding this profile and becoming a friend.

5. A buyer may want to require comment approval. If the account purchase is publicized, it should not be made known on your page. If people know that a profile is being used for marketing purposes they’re less likely to keep it as a friend.

Finally, I have listed some scenarios where a buyer and seller may have their biggest concerns.

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Have you accidentally become addicted to myspace?
If myspace is the first and last thing you check in a normal day, then you have probably considered deleting your account to return to reality. Depending on your reasons for wanting to stop using myspace, there might be more to be gained than a confirmation email stating that your account is gone forever.

A myspace account is a valuable web resource for online marketers
From a marketer’s perspective, by identifying a single person that falls within your target demographic you can market to their network of online friends with the assumption that they are like-minded people.
Take a sample profile as an example:

• 23 year old female
• Philadelphia resident
• Interested in independent music
• Aspiring vocal artist
• Strong interest in health & diet

Who do you think this person is friends with online? Her friends click on links in her bulletins and messages all the time, just like any other profile. They probably click on links on her page too. Now, as a marketer, if you are targeting other young people interested in independent music, or people interested in health foods in the Philadelphia area, enlisting this young woman as an ad conduit could be instrumental to a campaign. To be more clear, what I am describing here, is how myspace is a vehicle for marketing with a more transparent audience. All you need is a good definition of what your target demographic is, and the users will tell you who and where they are. There are clues, or more obvious facts about the people volunteered in their profiles. I hope the new market frontier I’m describing is giving you some ideas.

Is this really a new frontier?
Wawa already has a myspace profile. There’s even a profile for Wawa iced tea. Yes, lots of people add these nonsensical profiles as their friends, and if Wawa employees are the profile owners and maintainers, kudos to them. I would be more impressed if Wawa had purchased a few choice myspace profiles belonging to real users, and began putting iced tea coupons into bulletins.

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I am 25 (ok, 26 in a couple weeks) – and finally, I feel old.

I just found out that MTV is likely canceling Total Request Live. As Lauren Gitlin points out in her Rolling Stone article, TRL is almost the last bastion of music programming on MTV. I, like many others, have long been wondering what happened to my MTV. Where did the music go? I remember when MTV used to be good, when I used to come home from school and turn it on for hours. I grew up with MTV. And when reality TV was born with The Real World, I remember watching religiously; it was new, unique. Puck and Pedro… they were the original reality TV stars, way before Nick, Jessica and Paris.

So TRL viewership is down. What happened? Tom Anderson, one of the co-founders of MySpace, says, “I think we have replaced MTV. MySpace is more convenient. You can search for things, while MTV is just delivering things to you… That’s why TV viewership is dropping among the MySpace generation.”

I think Mr. Anderson is absolutely right, but needs to widen his scope just a bit. I’m not sure that it’s only MySpace that has replaced MTV, but social media, and even more broadly, technology as a whole has caused its downfall.

Videos: Not Just for TV

Video ipod. Need I say more?

What? You don’t have one? Ok, neither do I. But my point – music videos aren’t made to be shown only on MTV. They can be downloaded through iTunes and other similar applications. Many artists show music videos on their websites. Then, there is the monster known as YouTube.

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