• Display name
• Personal pictures
• Existing blogs
• Existing comments
• A list of friends exempt of being solicited personally

An agreement between a buyer and seller can be structured in any way. The possibilities are really up to the parties’ imaginations. Here are some other facts and ideas to be kept in mind when arriving at an agreement.

1. Keeping a seller’s pictures up can help to ensure that friends don’t delete the account after the transfer. It is common behavior to aggregate existing friends and not pay much attention to minor profile changes when the potential “deleter” has a long friend list and only interacts with a few people with regularity. As a buyer, don’t raise any flags by putting up an unlikely photo or doing anything else that might be suspect behavior, like bulletin spam.

2. The seller can change their account email address. They’ll no longer be found if someone searches based on email. It may, however, take weeks for the email to be removed from the search results.

3. One can enable an away message thus disabling new incoming messages if desired.

4. One can require a last name to add you as a friend (which can be changed to something not obviously guessable) if the seller does not want new real life friends finding this profile and becoming a friend.

5. A buyer may want to require comment approval. If the account purchase is publicized, it should not be made known on your page. If people know that a profile is being used for marketing purposes they’re less likely to keep it as a friend.

Finally, I have listed some scenarios where a buyer and seller may have their biggest concerns.

Selling scenarios:
1. The seller agrees to maintain the account with links / ad space and retains the password.

2. The seller gives up the password and the profile retains the seller’s identity. The seller agrees to give free reign to the buyer to solicit any of their friends and pose as them to any extent.

3. The seller gives up the password and the profile retains the seller’s identity. The buyer agrees to restrictions on what photos will remain, what type of new photos are acceptable, and limitations in blog posts, etc.; after all, the profile will be played as if it were still the seller. Of course the seller may have some interest in keeping their name clean!

4. The seller changes their identity completely and then sells with the password. This may not be as attractive to the buyer because there is a greater chance that profile friends will delete this mysterious new person they are friends with, but the seller can rest assured that the marketing efforts are not coming from their face & name directly. Remember, my hypothesis that people with tons of friends don’t regularly interact with them, thus keeping the friend retention of this type of purchased profile higher than what may be expected.

When is this going to hit?
By now, we should all be aware of pay-per-post bloggers that receive compensation for reviewing or mentioning products or services. I will agree that selling a myspace account is very similar in concept, but there are clearly some great advantages to myspace over a blog in this case – you can see your target audience.

I really think that the sellers need to create the online marketplace for these transactions to take place. No one would be happy knowing Wawa is seeking to purchase myspace accounts openly. It would all work better if there were some type of brokerage or means for a buyer to purchase privately.

So… does anyone want to buy a relatively small profile with a friend id in the 50,000 range?

A myspace account is a valuable web resource for online marketers
From a marketer’s perspective, by identifying a single person that falls within your target demographic you can market to their network of online friends with the assumption that they are like-minded people.
Take a sample profile as an example:

• 23 year old female
• Philadelphia resident
• Interested in independent music
• Aspiring vocal artist
• Strong interest in health & diet

Who do you think this person is friends with online? Her friends click on links in her bulletins and messages all the time, just like any other profile. They probably click on links on her page too. Now, as a marketer, if you are targeting other young people interested in independent music, or people interested in health foods in the Philadelphia area, enlisting this young woman as an ad conduit could be instrumental to a campaign. To be more clear, what I am describing here, is how myspace is a vehicle for marketing with a more transparent audience. All you need is a good definition of what your target demographic is, and the users will tell you who and where they are. There are clues, or more obvious facts about the people volunteered in their profiles. I hope the new market frontier I’m describing is giving you some ideas.

Is this really a new frontier?
Wawa already has a myspace profile. There’s even a profile for Wawa iced tea. Yes, lots of people add these nonsensical profiles as their friends, and if Wawa employees are the profile owners and maintainers, kudos to them. I would be more impressed if Wawa had purchased a few choice myspace profiles belonging to real users, and began putting iced tea coupons into bulletins.

Assigning Account Value
Here are some initial myspace account value metrics:

1. Age of account

Myspace profiles that are older appear higher on people’s friend lists. This means that when a user is browsing the friend list of a myspace user, older accounts are shown higher up than newer ones. This is like having a higher ranking on google. Users browsing other users’ friend lists are not as likely to find you on page 6 as they are on page 1. Thus an older profile shows closer to 1 in a list of friends, and provides greater visibility.

2. Quantity & Quality of friends

Address the interactivity of the friends someone has. Are they really friends with everyone or is this person just collecting profiles? A good profile will have frequent comments posted to it, or better yet frequent comments to blogs. This would indicate that not only are people interacting with this page by posting on it, but they’re reading the content that is posted by this user as well.

3. Type of friends / Friend demographics

Think about who people are friends with in general. The rule of locality of reference applies to people’s social interactions—person X will interact with person Y more often if they are closer geographically. Also think about who their friends are as consumers. Are they affluent post-grad professionals with spending money and defined interests or are they destitute college kids? You also want to consider this as a measure of value for your product. If you’re selling a weight loss product, you do not want to target a pocket of triathletes; they have no use for a such an item.

4. Page rank & Myspace URL quality.

Myspace gives a user the ability to have a short URL, e.g. www.myspace.com/johndoe19. If this has not been chosen already, the profile is definitely worth more to the buyer, as they still have an opportunity for placing keywords in the URL for search optimization.

Additionally, older profiles sometimes carry some page importance in search engines which makes them valuable to search engine optimizers for linking.

5. Activity levels in blogs, bulletins, etc.

A profile can also be more active, which is likely to make it more influential. Someone who is a very active user will have a more camouflaged guise after the account is sold, whereas if someone who posts bulletins very infrequently starts posting on a daily basis, it could raise some red flags indicating to their friend network that something is up with their profile.

Some examples

1. People are members of small social groups with similar interests giving direct access into specific markets. E.g. buy some indie rock kid’s profile and blog a list of new album suggestions.

2. Using myspace gives the ability to post bulletins to all friends, and to message people directly. This is a push medium, and you can target your demographic more specifically with less work!

3. Buy a 100,000 friend profile that gets a lot of views and slap some banners or well placed links on it.

Later this week I will continue these ideas and expand more specifically on how myspace deals in this marketplace might work.