Myspace Going Retail. Alert: Social Media Landscape Change

Written by Pablo Palatnik on October 31, 2007

Myspace has announced a new partnership with Zazzle.com that will enable a user on a site to customize & purchase merchandise from a band (music oriented at this point I believe.)

As the Wall Street Journal reports, “The Zazzle “widget” will take fans to an online store the band has set up, with a gallery of approved artwork and a range of products to put it on.

Zazzle Chief Strategy Officer James Heckman cites a hypothetical customer: “A girl who wants a fitted, cropped tank shirt, but only likes one band member. She can isolate his face, put it on the exact shirt she wants, and it will be on its way to her the next morning” from the company’s manufacturing plant in San Jose, Calif.”

Here is what I find most interesting and exciting about this as a marketer. I wrote an ebook on Myspace Marketing which I have sold and been successful selling products on Myspace but this changes everything once applied to profiles selling products, etc.

When marketing on Myspace or anywhere else, I’d say especially social media sites through profiles since they are time consuming, you want to convert your user and this whole time on Myspace, we’ve been making the user take the extra step of driving them to the profile with links to purchase products. This new feature will make the conversion process easier by eliminating the step of driving the user elsewhere and having products right on the profile. What is even cooler is that the user can customize the product as described in the example above by James Heckman.

Again, this widget is only for music profiles for bands since the bands don’t even have to own merchandise but provide the images! So, if you’re a band and don’t have merchandise, you will have the option to sell merchandise to your fans without actually manufacturing clothing and incurring that cost.
This concept will be re-created for all types of products, etc and social media retail is next on the list to create huge buzz and advertiser interest.