A year ago I was testing a site with some other UW students, and we were asked 'so, do you think this could be a hip and cool thing for students to do?' We sugarcoated our answer, but it was no. I'm not really sure what hip and cool means anyways.
Rolling Stone is planning on launching a social network, a 'MySpace style network based around the Rolling Stone brand.' The problem, of course, is that they want us to use their site, but their demographic is older than us. According to Andrea Feczko, a student at NYU who 'broke,' the story, only one person in her class admitted to reading the magazine.
My roommate subscribed for a year, but no longer does. The brand is still strong, but not one the college demographic readily identifies with. If I was Rolling Stone, I wouldn't try and draw users away from their current social network. As I talked about with profiles, competing for my social networking attention is pretty tough to do. I can only make so many profiles, check so many sites, write my favorite bands down so many times.
I'm all for the niching of the networked web, but why not integrate the Rolling Stone brand into the networks, rather than fighting them? Music is the backbone of MySpace in my opinion, and bands and wannabe rockstars continue to utilize it. Bring the 'American Idol version of lists' and best of lists and digitized versions of Rolling Stone to the social networks. Build the new RS online around tools that users want to put on their social networking sites. Give them widgets and more integrated song features. Give them news and bios and let them vote (then integrate the site into a section of the physical magazine). Put users pictures in the magazine. We may not read it much, but it'd be awesome to have a picture in Rolling Stone.
The community will build around the functionality, not the other way around. We have all the community building functionality we could ever need on other sites. What new can you offer? The brand name is strong, the music category is 'hip and cool.' Find out what we want to use on our social networks and build it for us. If we like it, and use it, the community will come (see Last.fm)
It's great that they're evolving their online presence for us. Their challenge will be to evolve into something that we want, rather than what they may think we want.
Comments