What MySpace Means, in London

My friend and blogging partner Jackie Danicki have met up in some odd places. Last January we got together for a weekend in her hometown of Chillicothe, Ohio, where over coffee she mapped out her idea for a  marketing think tank focused on helping business catch hold of the leading edge of web 2.0, social networking, blogs, etc... the upshot of that conversation being that today I'm in London, where yesterday Jackie's Engagement Alliance held a well-attended conference for marketeers, journalists and assorted curious onlookers on the topic of What MySpace Means: Lessons for Every Brand.

Adriana Cronin-Lukas raised an interesting and deeply optimistic point about how social networks, when threatened by any form of regulation, are extremely adept at performing their own damage control by simply mutating, reforming, or cropping up elsewhere.  You can't keep a good network down.

Scott Norvell, London Bureau Chief of Fox News, was a refreshing "old media" voice.  Perhaps because Fox is doing so well, growth-wise, he embraced the idea of the blogosphere's function as both a media watchdog and media resource. 

The Guardian's Victor Keegan was particularly fascinating, being equally well-versed in old media and new, and he touched on one of my favorite topics, wondering why there was as yet no "eBay for banking."

Antoine Clarke talked about the regulation of pharmaceutical speech and how social networks are making advertising bans in the UK obsolete (prompting the day's most contentious audience reaction).  The debate focused on whether or not consumers were competent to evaluate pharmaceuticals--i.e., we need to be protected from ourselves.  To which I always think of arguments about how "competent" we are to evaluate our political leadership, for example, or the foods we eat--goodness, should be "protected from ourselves" on those scores, too?

I went last, jet lag and all, talking about what business might look like when the MySpace generation grows up.  I'll post more on that a bit later....

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