Five questions for MySpace Canada   |  September 11, 2008  

Sitting down with Dave Stevens, the new general manager of MySpace Canada

By Trevor Marshall

Armed with four million Canadian profiles plus insight and experience from his previous positions at CanWest Digital Media, AOL Canada, Rogers Television and Country Music Television, Steven is charged with building the MySpace presence in Canada. Backbone sat down with Stevens to find out what role, if any, MySpace can play for Canadian businesses.

Backbone: Your appointment suggests some changes taking place for MySpace Canada. What’s happening?

Stevens: For MySpace internationally, the territories are a priority and Canada is very much a priority, so they wanted to have somebody here to drive that strategy. MySpace is really becoming a social environment—a social portal, I’d say—and that means trying to reinvent the way people interact on the Web. Other social networks are really just an online address book. [MySpace] is a social environment where people can communicate with their friends, communicate about specific content, plan events, create a calendar—it’s all encompassing.

Also, I’ll be building the team here; right now we’re a team of 11 and we’ll be building that up to about 20 people.

Backbone: What are you bringing to this position from CanWest?

Stevens: I was responsible for the product management for canada.com and the operations and strategy for dose.ca, the flagship youth brand, so I’m bringing my knowledge of content and sales and how to make those two work together, because often they’re church and state. But one needs to work with the other—it’s vital. To get the advertiser to the audience, we have to make sure the product is engaging the audience.

Backbone: You mentioned advertising: obviously that’s one of the ways in which Canadian businesses will be interested in MySpace.

Stevens: We’re reinventing the way advertisers reach their audience. It’s more than just putting a banner ad on a page. It’s more than just doing a pre-roll video. That’s all stuff we can do of course, which is fantastic. But now we can allow users to interact with content from advertisers, interact with messages from advertisers and create an entire social experience in which the advertiser is ingrained in their daily activity on the Web.

Backbone: What should savvy companies be looking at when they’re considering whether, and how, to use MySpace in ways that go beyond advertising? Is there a role for them to get involved as members of the community?

Stevens: Very much so. It’s the only way businesses can get direct feedback from their customers immediately. Let’s say a company is testing a new product; it could be put online at MySpace and people can come and test the product and provide immediate feedback. Entire product development can be done through a user profile and [companies] benefit from immediate response from a very tech-savvy audience that’s tuned into pop culture. That’s a fantastic opportunity; if I was a business I’d be all over that. You just can’t get that anywhere else.

Backbone: Is there anything that businesses should do to prepare themselves before they go down this road? What advice do you have?

Stevens: I’d tell them that they must have a strong digital vision. They need to be committed to it. They need to be able to take the bad with the good. Not all feedback is going to be good, but they can learn from the bad. They need to be willing to be involved in their digital strategy on a day-to-day basis. It’s not something a business can just throw out there and then hope people interact. They need to interact with the audience, too. They need to be committed to the digital space and although there are a lot of companies that want to be, they have to truly be ready to demonstrate it. The payoffs down the road are enormous. Commit to a digital strategy and get involved in the MySpace world and the social world that MySpace offers, and the payoffs are huge.


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