The title says it all, MySpace or Facebook, or both? Representing the two titans of social networking were, Heidi Browning, Senior Vice President, Insight & Planning, MySpace
and Chris Pan, Head of Brand Solutions, Facebook.

For the presentation Heidi and Chris compared how one campaign was executed differently on MySpace and Facebook. The first MySpace sample, Bruno, as in the former Borat.

The Bruno page is quite a experience, from the photography to the content. The Bruno page also promotes other social media and social networking activity related to Bruno/the movie.

The next example was VitaminWater, one of their first campaigns was built along with rapper, 50 Cent and features music, playlists and other forms of interactivity.

They’ve also launched a community featuring content/commercials from the brand. VitaminWater has been using traditional advertising to drive users to MySpace.

Now let’s look from the Facebook perspective. For VitaminWater, they first launched with a campaign around the ‘Great Debate’ featuring Kobe Bryant and LeBron James. By nature the topic was very conversational.

The advertising elements on Facebook provide users the option to vote for their favorite player. That interactivity drives engagement. Users that interact with the ads can then become fans of the brand. As users become fans, that status update appears in their wall and other friends see this, then they become fans. It’s a true viral effect.

Chris looked at data from Compete and Quantcast on the traffic to VitaminWater’s web site and compared that to the number of fans they have on Facebook. There is no comparison, Facebook allows them to reach a larger audience.

On Facebook, half the users come back everyday. Looking at fan pages then, that fan base is very engaged and the ability to send updates to them is a very powerful resource.

Who is the audience? On MySpace, it’s not just teenagers. Heidi said the 18-34 market is the majority of their audience.

On Facebook, Chris said that in the US they have 60 million active users. They count an active user as somebody that has logged on in the past three days. Globally they have 200 million active users, with 100 million logging on each day.

Both brands allow advertisers to work with their dedicated account teams to mine the user data/demographics to target advertising. A key component to all the advertising/brand work is interactivity. This can be defined as users interacting with each other or the brand interacting with the users.

Both panelists agree that the true value is an ongoing relationship and not a short-lived campaign. Once a user becomes a fan, you need to keep the updates flowing.

People tend to follow other people, for example the character Jack Bauer has twice as
many fans as the show ‘24′.

MySpace and Facebook have hyper-targeting functions to create campaigns to reach a very select audience. For example, if you wanted to reach office managers in a select city, it’s possible.

One mistake that many brands make is running the same ads/creative on MySpace or Facebook that they run in traditional channels. Get interactive or targeted!

Next up is Duncan Wardle from Disney.