Now keep in mind that the #2 spot was secured with 33.9 million visitors in June – a 63% increase from 2010 – however Facebook

Slow and steady

had 160.9 million visitors. That’s kind of like saying you came in second at the Boston Marathon – but really there were only two runners…and the Kenyan guy nearly lapped you on his way to victory.

Now that’s not to say that LinkedIn isn’t a social media power – it definitely is – and even more so since it’s very successful IPO (whether or not the IPO should have been so successful is a different topic all together).

However, while they must take some satisfaction from surpassing MySpace, LinkedIn should consider taking a few lessons lessons from MySpace’s history as well.

Remember when you last used MySpace? For me, it was July 24^th, 2008. I know this because that’s when I wrote “I’d rather you visit me on Facebook” as my status update and never went back. MySpace was huge, innovative and exciting – enough for News Corp to purchase it for $580 million. Years later, it’s just an animated .gif wasteland filled with bands that you’ve never heard of that recently sold for just $35 million.

JT knows that it was just a movie, right?

The problem was that MySpace never did anything. Sure they expanded into markets and recently changed the logo and look of the site – but it’s still an eye sore of a page and basically useless to the average social media user.

The biggest lesson that can be learned from the former #2 social networking site is the difference between them and Facebook. That difference is that Facebook became a platform and MySpace was always just a website.

You basically can’t visit a website now without seeing Facebook integration. And by the looks of it, LinkedIn is following suit with their Apply with LinkedIn button that employers can add to their own website. The challenge becomes what more can they do to keep moving forward and become ingrained within their users every day lives while still being a social network for professionals.

Kevin Smith is an Account Supervisor at PJA Advertising & Marketing. Follow him on Twitter: @Mr_KevinSmith

Culture

Social media has changed our culture in two ways. First, having social media pervasive through out our agency culture has done wonders for generating insightful content and information, not only to our internal teams, but to the social media universe at large. Second, social media has changed the way that we share our agency culture with the rest of the world. For example, we use our Facebook page to give people a peek into our own culture. On our page you’ll find photos of our office, interesting articles on design, insights on team members, and coverage of events like Portfolio Night that we’ve sponsored for the last two years in San Francisco and Boston.

Conversation

We believe that sharing our IP is important for both our prospects and industry colleagues to help them understand who we are and what we do. And one of the best ways to share our insights is through a collection of blogs, including our flagship blog The Complex Brand which has roughly five to six authors. We also contribute to AdAge’s Small Agency Diary authored by our CEO, Phil Johnson, who writes about the daily realities of life within America’s small advertising agencies. It’s a frank discussion of the highlights, lowlights, challenges, and controversies faced by agency executives in the trenches. Our President, Mike O’Toole contributes to MarketingProfs Daily Fix a rich resource that offers practical know-how from marketing leaders to help people with their own marketing challenges. We also have a niche blog, The Secret Life of the Life Scientist, which talks to those people who market to who else – life scientists. Using all of these different outlets for conversation allows us to talk with prospects and colleagues on the changing marketing landscape, and to share our thoughts on current marketing issues. These blogs have done wonders for developing our social media outreach and driving two-way conversations, and in some cases driving leads and winning business.

Content

Content covers a lot of ground, and can mean almost anything. For the purpose of this blog I needed another “c” word and thought that content would work well for a discussion of Twitter. For us, Twitter, our @agencypja feed, is a great channel for sharing compelling content. If you’ve read my earlier blog post, you know that we share everything from industry statistics to compelling creative, to social media news, as well as any other content that we feel colleagues, prospects and clients might find interesting. We want our Twitter feed to be a snap shot for what’s on our blog.

Connections

You couldn’t ask for a better example of “connections” than LinkedIn. For me, this is one of the greatest new business tools developed next to Google. As a new business person, LinkedIn is where the search begins. It used to be you had to either Google your way to find the head of marketing organization, or go to the company Web site, or network your way to find the appropriate name. Today, with LinkedIn, you can find your prospects by incorporating a title into advanced search and read the descriptions of those who rise to the top. This allows me to look at a whole company and see the top one, two or even three people that I would like to include as prospects. It’s just a fantastic tool.

Channels

Although the heart of this blog post is about how social media has become an integral part of our marketing outreach, we’ve learned that our greatest success comes from using multiple marketing channels together. This includes using traditional outreach such as direct marketing (print and e-mail), traditional networking with humans, yes, using that little thing on your desk called a phone (and yes I believe in using telecommunications, but not the cold, cold call), eNewsletters, public relations, agency awards, the agency Web site, speaking engagements, and now social media marketing. I absolutely believe that our success as an agency comes from working all these channels.

Social media has made an incredible impact on how we’ve marketed our agency. But what we have learned is that social media is most effective  for our marketing efforts when it’s been part of a comprehensive marketing outreach effort.