By Charlotta Hedman
Last week disgraced media mogul Rupert Murdoch admitted that News Corp had failed when it came to Myspace. His exact words were ”we screwed up in every way possible”. Nice. Now as with any big failure there are lessons to be learned.
1. Be careful what you tweet. The news broke in typical Murdoch style, with a tweet from Murdoch’s already controversial use of the social networking site. During the Consumer Electronics Show Murdoch tweeted ” Many questions and jokes about My Space.simple answer – we screwed up in every way possible, learned lots of valuable expensive lessons”. Now Murdoch doesn’t really have to care about Myspace anymore, since he sold it for a pittance (35 million dollars) to Justin Timberlake (and others) in June 2011, but admitting failure won’t do his already dented reputation any favours.
2. Look at the business model. News Corp bought Myspace for 580 million dollars in 2005. Now we all know that hot tech companies are worth a lot of money. That’s how the industry works and a lot of people have invested time, money and their first born children in these astronomical figures. Figures that most people outside the industry find difficult to get their head around. It’s not always obvious why a company like Myspace or Facebook should be worth billions. One simple mistake to avoid is paying over the odds for a company just because everyone else says it’s worth a lot.
3. Stay ahead of competitors. This is a hard one for any big media or tech company. How do you stay ahead of the competition when everyone is looking for the next new and shiny thing. During the last five years Facebook has been the new and shiny thing in social media. Goodbye Myspace, you are now redundant. The question is, can any company stop this kind of exodus once it’s started. Could Apple do it?
4. Think small instead of big. The start-ups out there are going to be the stars of the future. Invest in them and you might win instead of losing billions.
On the contrary, I think better of Murdoch (on this issue at least) as he was able to fess up about what everyone else was already saying for some time. It really was glaringly obvious that they had wrecked the site. So what’s the harm in saying so yourself?
Yet a surprisingly large number of musicians still use MySpace. There must be a lesson there as well – plus the fact that someone actually paid money to acquire it! Wonders never cease.