Spending a day with my new homies at MySpace

Posted By Hup | November 23, 2008

Yesterday I made it down to LA, was picked up by a guy driving a sweet Lincoln Continental and headed over to MySpace’s Beverly Hills office around 10am. At that point I met up with Stephanie Yang, who does PR for MySpace and would be my escort for the day. She was super cool, full of energy and was just in for the day from the Bay Area, where she works in the San Francisco MySpace office.

The first stop of the day was a chat with Jason Kirk, the Vice President of video and entertainment for MySpace. I was meeting with him to talk about a video project that I put together called The Top 8 Tour. The Top 8 Tour was an idea that I came up with about 4 years ago as a way to document and show the world why MySpace was about to become the biggest phenomenon that the web has ever seen. We hung out for an hour or so and had some really interesting conversations revolving around the opportunity to partner up so that the Top 8 Tour footage could finally be turned into something that’s as amazing as I know it can be. The meeting finished up with Jason getting excited enough about the project to bring in their original content director into the mix. Hopefully this is a sign that after 4 years of waiting, something might actually come out of one of the craziest projects that I’ve ever been involved in(that’s saying a lot). But, only time will tell and after already waiting this long I’ve learned not to get too excited about it. Overall this was a very, very exciting meeting and one that will help me out on my continued goal of getting the story of The Top 8 Tour out to the masses.

After the meeting with Jason, Stephanie wanted to go introduce me to Tom Anderson(yes, the Tom), but he wasn’t going to be back in the office until 2pm and it was only 11:30am. It was kind of a bummer, but luckily I ended up bringing one of my MySpace For Dummies books along with me, so Stephanie left it with Tom’s assistant with the directions to have Tom sign it(and hopefully take a pic with it). They’re going to send it back to me to me in Palo Alto as soon as Tom can hook it up. How freakin’ cool is that?

Before our next meeting, Stephanie and I stopped over by the desk of Brianne Pins, who is MySpace Music’s PR Diva, where she literally gave me bags and bags of awesome MySpace Music swag(some sweet pics of me and Steph modeling the swag over here). We seemed to hit it off as soon as we met and she even invited me to a Good Charlotte concert on Saturday night, which was very cool of her to offer. Being the MySpace Music Queen Bee seems to be a pretty solid gig with a lot of perks, such as working with Snoop Dogg one day and then with Guns ‘n Roses the next. Never a dull moment, I’m sure.

Next up was a meeting with Adam Bain and the new MySpace MyAds team at their Santa Monica Hills office(we had another driver take us there, of course). They’re the ones that head up MySpace’s self-serve ad system which is what I wrote about on TechCrunch and what got me invited down to MySpace in the first place. Me, Stephanie, Adam and his right-hand man and good friend Arnie all went out to grab some lunch so that we could get to know each others worlds a bit better. Adam and Arnie are two of the main people who launched the MyAds system, which is one MySpace’s biggest ideas to date. It has huge revenue potential, allows literally anyone to promote and advertise and still stays in line with MySpace’s overall goal of allowing their users to express themselves and of fostering creativity and communication among the millions of people that interact with their site each day. Admittedly, it got pretty nerdy sometimes as we discussed some pretty high-level visions and viewpoints of what’s next in social media advertising and marketing, but I loved every second of it. It felt great to open up about my opinions and thoughts on MySpace while hearing all about their ideas and strategy regarding where they’re moving to in the future. We hung out for another couple hours after we finished up lunch and we dug into more and more topics on MySpace vs. Facebook, what HubPages is all about, my ideas on social media marketing and who knows what else.

As the full day of meetings ended and I was chilling in the back of yet another slick, black Lincoln Continental on my 2 hour ride back, I began typing away on my laptop as I remembered thoughts, comments, statistics and other interesting things that I took away from the last few hours. I have to admit that it felt amazing to get the chance to meet and talk to the people that I did while visiting MySpace - they were all super-smart, easy to talk to and very hospitable. You know, the types of people that made me move out here to the west coast in the first place. Kinda funny how things start to work out, eh?

Filed Under new/random experience, random thoughts, travel

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    One Talkie! to “Spending a day with my new homies at MySpace”

    1. A MySpace swag extravaganza : Hup and Steph on November 24th, 2008 11:47 am

      [...] In my last post I mentioned that while I was hanging at the MySpace offices, I got hooked up with some major swag. So much, in fact, that I felt like I had to grab Stephanie and pose for a few pics with all of it. Some call it shameless promotion, but we just call it another day in the life of Hup and Steph. In other words, this is how we roll. Be sure to scroll down t the bottom to see me sneaking in a Whoopie Cushion on Stephanie - it’s a classic. [...]

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