Changing Media Summit – Social Networking

After a nice introduction by Nick Higham and Emily Bell, the first main talk of the day was about social networking, with Travis Katz, SVP & General Manager, International at MySpace.

It was a nice talk, though quite mainstream, essentially about MySpace (surprise!). Maybe I could add here that most of the people attending the summit were from all sides of the BBC, major newspapers, from a few TV channels, and quite a few people from charities, governmental and non-profit organisations (they had a discount). A few marketing managers from other companies were there too, so a lot of people from “old media” and for whom most of the content of the summit was really new.

(I’m going to assume here that if you’re reading this blog you know enough about MySpace, otherwise I’m sure there are better places to find out the basics about it)

I did learn a few interesting things I didn’t know about on the video side of things particularly, MySpace TV announced two days ago that they had agreed on a partnership with Channel 5 to create a news program aimed at the 16 – 34 years old: link.

I didn’t know that the online series they started, Quarterlife, had been bought by NBC. Now that sounded very cool and quite impressive to everyone in the audience, but looking into it the show was bought, NBC aired the 1st episode in February this year and cancelled it immediately for cause of dismal ratings, check the Wikipedia entry – which is not as cool all of a sudden… I guess it’s a start though. I have to admit I heard about the show, seen the website, but never actually watched more than a minute of it – I don’t know if it’s good at all (that would be a no according to the NBC ratings).

This one I liked: he talked about the partnership they recently signed with Hammer Films to create a movie called Beyond the Rave that will be released online first in bite size pieces and then in DVD format.

Check the trailer here, it made me think of Dog Soldiers, but with vampires (and teens instead of the army, I guess).

And the film set:

Also in the interesting stuff, MySpace organised their largest live streamed concert to date for troops in Kuwait a few days ago as well: link

The rest of the talk was about MySpace and how great social networking is, that we’ve only seen the tip of iceberg, latest numbers and facts about MySpace, etc. The audience questions were (unsurprisingly) focused around asking if this was all for young people or whether any of it was relevant to older people (a notion often meant as “my customers/readers/viewers”,”the people with the money”, etc.) – a recurrent theme throughout the day, but more about that in upcoming posts!