Remember MySpace? You know, the social sharing site that was pretty popular before Facebook took the world by storm? Well it seems MySpace hasn't forgotten its former members and is reaching out with a unique, to say the least, marketing strategy to get former users active on the site once again.
How? By reminding users of embarrassing private photos they once shared or housed on the social network site. Yes, that's the marketing strategy.
As one news report notes, it's sort of like a blackmail approach, but then again not really, as MySpace isn't threatening to make the photos public or share them with anyone else. Maybe it could be viewed as a public service campaign: 'Hey remember you shared this photo of you and your girlfriend doing xxxxx.'
The struggling social network that was pushed off into the side of the online social network highway by Facebook is just trying to entice members back with a pithy email, with a subject header of "Your Photos are Back" and an email text of: "The good, the rad, and the what were you thinking... View Your Photos."
A MySpace spokesperson told the Washington Post that it's purely reaching out to current and past users to "re-engage them through a personalized experience."
One problem, though, is that those former users likely don't even know how to access their MySpace accounts at this point. They probably don't even remember what photos they had on their pages.
Luckily though the directed email message does provide a link to the user's former MySpace page. The social network was acquired by Specific Media for $35 million from News Corp. in 2011 and relaunched as a music service and social site and the company just infused a reported $20 million into getting it back in swing.
According to one report, MySpace has 15 billion photos of users in its database, which comes up a bit short when you consider Facebook boasts 250 billion user images.
MySpace.com launched in 2003, according to Wikipedia, and had 1 million users in less than a year. It's heyday was likely in 2006 when it beat Google as top visited website. As of May it was ranked 982 in web traffic and as of 2011 had just 200 employees.
