My MySpace page is boring.
I don’t have a tiled background. My “About Me” section is not what most people would consider “interesting”. And you won’t find any glitter graphics on my page.
But I have to be honest – I kind of like it that way.
There’s nothing that I hate more than clicking on someone’s profile and being bombarded with animated gifs and funky sized images of their favorite actors and actresses. I think it looks cheesy and creates an automatic sensory overload.
But that’s not to say that I’m completely close-minded when it comes to adding new features to my page.
Enter Social Vibe.
Social Vibe is a site that gives its members opportunities to become ambassadors to their favorite brands by adding “support” buttons to their social networking profiles.
Here’s how it works: Users sign up for the site and select from a number of major brands (X-Box, Nike, Apple) that they wish to endorse. They then have the ability to grab a clickable brand logo and paste it onto their public MySpace or Facebook pages.
Users earn points for the amount of time that these buttons remain on their pages. These points can either be used to select from a number of brand-related prizes or donated as cash to a cause of their choice (i.e. Arts and Culture).
There’s also a social networking platform built right into the Social Vibe site, allowing users to connect with one another, share photos and do all the other good stuff that the kids these days are doing.
I’ve had a couple of buttons pasted on my MySpace profile for about two weeks now, and have earned somewhere around 50 points. I’m not eligible to buy anything with my points yet, but I’m still pretty stoked that I’m on a track to earn prizes by doing virtually nothing.
The site brings an innovative means of bridging social media with web advertising and word of mouth recommendations to the table. Just think of the number of targeted impressions and click-throughs that these social network buttons have the ability to garner. Not to mention the countless opportunities that these brands will have to tap into their Social Vibe fan base in the future.
The only real issue I see in Social Vibe’s model goes back to the beginning of this entry: it’s hard to find many social networking profiles that aren’t junked up with Zombie applications, huge graphics of cats jumping up and down or gigantic images of Johnny Depp. So, I’m going to assume that many of these “support” buttons are going to lost in the mix.
But, in the long run, that doesn’t really matter. These companies are developing a relationship with consumers that will last far beyond the life of their social networking buttons. They’ll quickly build up a long list of ambassadors that they’ll be able to reach out to for anything they may need in the future.
So, for now, I’m sticking with Social Vibe because I think it’s pretty cool and it would take effort on my part to get out of the program now.
I’ll let you know if and when I start picking up some prizes!
