Communication Successes & Tech Failures at MySpace, Meeting Customers' Needs & Wants in a Complex Environment

I've posted quite a bit about Myspace or MySpace or Myspace.com or whatever it's actually called so I thought I'd give a little update on my recent observations, since it is one of the more interesting developments in social networking and music marketing in the last couple of years.

I set up an account recently and decided to be honest about who I was without directly identifying myself, i.e. age, interests and background, which probably makes me kind of an oddball in the Myspace social milieu. But that's good cause it gives me a little distance and keeps me from turning it into a fantasy playland which I think it probably is for some folks.

I was initially impressed by Myspace because the individual home pages had multiple options for customization and various features like blogs and so forth. What I understand better now is that they offer multiple modes of communication that people mix and match. Some people communicate mostly through friends comments or picture comments or blog comments or email or their blogs or their bulletin space or instant messaging (I think that covers it) but everyone seems to use a different combination. Each form has a different level of interactivity, some are more about publishing or broadcasting and others are more about conversation.

Yet each is a specific platform for communication that has discrete technical requirements and that's where the problems arise. In fact, though I should be posting other things here right now, I was just trying to respond to someone's bulletin post and got an error message. It was a new error message which I won't describe but it reminds me that I've seen a wider variety of error messages on Myspace than on any other website or when working with any piece of software. It's amazing how many things can and do go wrong at Myspace. Yet they keep growing!

I often log in very late at night because I'm a night owl. Unfortunately, U.S. based techies tend to be working then and over the last couple of weeks the site has been down for repair at least 7 or 8 different evenings, in some cases for quite awhile. What that usually means is that you can view the site but you can't log in and that's a real pain because it removes most of the functionality.

What's most interesting to me about this situation is that you very rarely encounter serious examination of such problems in the mainstream tech or business media, though if Yahoo was encountering similar problems it would be discussed on blogs and at tech sites and at financial sites and the stock might even take a hit. I'm not sure why a lucrative component (Myspace) of a public company (Intermix) that gets a lot of news for its success is not being scrutinized in terms of its performance. Maybe it's because the people that write about it don't use it and the people that use it don't write about it?

But it's also an interesting example of the fact that there are simultaneous conflicting discourses in business regarding how good your service needs to be, both the services and customer/technical support, and what people really require in order to use a service. Some people claim that only the highest quality service/product will win and if you roll out something not as good as what's available no one will use it. But I was recently checking out iMacs and iBooks for a cheap upgrade and those low-end LCD screens are far inferior to the old iMac's cathode-ray tube monitor, especially when reading text online, yet I've never heard user complaints on the topic and folks seem to love the LCD screens.

What I'm trying to get at is that people will accept dysfunctional technology and spend lots of money on it if the functions that are provided fulfill needs and wants that aren't otherwise filled. People flock to mobile phones yet the actual voice quality and security is far inferior to landlines because they need/want that mobility. People love the LCD screens because they can get larger screens cheaper and they allow cooler design (and probably other reasons that I haven't checked out). People love Myspace because it's a premier hookup spot and it offers lots of features that allow for personalization of both the look and the modes of communication.

This line of thought raises a lot of interesting questions in a business sense and undermines the tendency to assume that a better product will always win (remember Beta format video? - probably not). The question for Myspace becomes whether or not they can get their tech together before their crazy popularity gets undermined by services provided by a company like Yahoo, which can handle the technology and can advertise across its own large network but isn't quite as cool. It's also a reminder that business isn't just complicated, it's complex.

Between services and solutions and branding and lock-in and all the various things that play into business success, one can't simply focus on one factor or even just add the factors together. They interact in unpredictable ways and require attention to both the parts and the whole with an ability to function with both tactical flexibility and strategic vision. That means there are both many ways to win and many ways to lose and no real room for resting on one's laurels, yet it also means that one can succeed without being perfect, since no business can reach perfection in such an environment, and that there's always room for new players if they're willing to adapt to reality.

By the way, this post was also partly inspired by attempting to post comments at BusinessWeek's Blogspotting blog where a writer was discussing being "perpetually in beta", a great concept that's working well for many businesses, and someone commented that customers wouldn't accept tech that didn't work. I'd link to the post but they didn't have much more to say than that and I'm annoyed that their comments wouldn't work and that their trackback system also hasn't been working properly. So I've stopped linking to Brand New Day posts as well because they get the link but I don't get the trackback without writing them and asking them to update it. I know I'm being petty but there's so much good stuff online to share that no one is a must link.

I know this was a rather long rambling post but for folks who think I occasionally have something worthwhile to say in terms of the business of digital media, this hits a lot of what I've been thinking about of late. I'll be back with more hip hop business news quite soon, I promise!

Comments

[Michael Miraflor]

MySpace is going to plateau within the next year, the same way Friendster did in 2003. Look for The Facebook to continue to eat away at the MySpace user base the same way MySpace ate away at Friendster.

[Marshall Kirkpatrick]

Great post. I'd say too that MySpace's technical problems are proof that such things don't just vanish once there's lots of money. You'd think they'd be able to hire people to test and fix all the things you're finding broken, but no...

Found you via PaidContent and I'm real glad. Best of luck. Your site looks great. One thing you might want to add is links to save a blog post to Furl or Del.icio.us, code available here:
http://marshallk.blogspot.com/2005/08/adding-links-for-furl-this-and-save-in.html