In an effort to find the opportunity in the fast-growing arena of social networking sites, one of outdoor adventure gear retailer Backcountry.com’s experiments has been on MySpace.com. A year ago, Backcountry created a branded profile page for its snowboard site, Dogfunk.com, to find out if having friends (MySpace.com members) sign up to connect to the branded page would ultimately drive people to the e-commerce site. Some 3,000 friends on MySpace.com/Dogfunk later, the answer’s a qualified “no” – at least, not yet.
“The model we were trying to prove was, if we got more friends, does that equal traffic to our site,” says vice president of marketing Dustin Robertson. Noting that other branded pages on MySpace, such as that of snowboard maker The Burton Corp., have signed up 20,000 friends or more. Robertson says that at the level of 3,000, he can’t yet find a friends-to-site traffic lift. On the other hand, since most other retailers are also just at the figuring-it-out stage when it comes to social networking, he expects to continue the experiment to see where it leads.
Robertson notes that the exploration of MySpace has been a low-cost endeavor, as the brand’s MySpace page is administered by Backcountry employees who are themselves MySpace participants. “You can’t hire just anybody to do this. It has to be somebody that knows the right tone, what to do and how it works. We had a willing labor pool so we can participate at a super-low cost,” he adds. “At a couple of hundred bucks a month, we will probably continue doing it for a while to see if we can make something happen.”
Backcountry is one of many online retailers trying to find their place in the booming realm of social networking. Sites such as MySpace.com, YouTube.com and Facebook.com, which exist to allow members to share interests and activities rather than for factual content or for shopping, are getting marketers’ attention with their rapid growth. MySpace’s unique audience rose 23% to more than 60 million in August of this year over last August, while YouTube’s unique audience rose 66% to more than 56 million and Facebook’s rose 117% to more than 19 million, according to Nielsen/NetRatings Inc.
“We’re in a nebulous phase of Internet marketing right now,” says Robertson. “We’re going from all of those things you did to drive traffic in 2002 – paid search, affiliates, e-mail. They were measurable – you could hone and refine them. But it’s been honed and refined to death. If we want to leapfrog and get another revolution going, we have to keep moving with the Internet.”
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