MySpace’s Mobile VP on mobilizing social networks

John Faith

According to an ABI Research survey, 46% of those who use social networks have also visited a network through a mobile phone. Nearly 70% visited MySpace, and 67% visited Facebook, whereas no other social networking site reached 15% mobile adoption. MySpace also announced last week that in its first week on BlackBerry handsets alone, consumers downloaded the MySpace app more than 400,000 times, an all-time high for both MySpace and Research in Motion. Social networking has clearly caught on this year, and MySpace has been at the forefront of the mobile push. John Faith, general manager and vice president of mobile for MySpace, spoke with Associate News Editor Sarah Reedy about what has been a banner year for mobile social networking.

On the drivers of mobile social networking: No longer are smartphone devices solely meant for business. Because you have smartphone adoption with easier text input, richer graphical experiences, those attribute themselves to a better social networking experience on a device. They also raise the consumer’s expectations as to what they can do on the phone. You have a full circle about smartphone adoption and the expectation that because you have a smartphone you’ll get a better experience.Another thing helping the adoption of MySpace and communication applications in general are all-you-can-eat data plans and the proliferation of them. No longer do you have to worry about being an 18 year old getting a $300 bill because you are on MySpace a lot. That’s really helping adoption of our applications, as well as the proliferation of applications and app storefronts…When you have the ability to distribute your applications directly to consumers, that is very powerful. Even more powerful is the ability for end consumers to search and find the applications they want and find compelling. You are taking out the somewhat cloudy experience of going through commercial distributors or carrier distribution decks.

On the spread of mobile social networking: Within MySpace, the preconceived notion is it’s the younger generation, but we have users spanning all generations and demographics and spanning them globally. On our mobile properties, typically it’s safe to say that probably 60% of traffic is coming from the collegiate and younger crowd. I would say that might be simply because they are more technically savvy and they’ve grown up with and know how to get all the info they can access on phones, and they expect those experiences on them, but we certainly do still have a number of people accessing our mobile properties via Android, iPhone and RIM that are all over the place.