Marketing Pilgrim

Social networking site Bebo has its own “Open Media” platform for music and video content. If you’re a member of Bebo you can create your own profile but now you can put video and your favorite music on it. Not audio files though (which someone should develop). Media companies can also create their own profiles.

When anyone says social networking profile I can’t help myself but translate that into free publicity for me and my company (or clients). I’ve been asked how I do my reputation management online, and there’s one of my secrets. It doesn’t take long to create profiles of yourself everywhere and focus on a few social networking sites that are worth a deeper time investment. Because they are time investments. But they are also ways to get links and exposure online. And the sites like Bebo get unique content. I’d think this would be especially big for small companies (local real estate agents, etc) who may not even have a web site or much competition online.

The service is like a hybrid between MySpace’s MySpaceTV (catch iJustine who I heard last week at BlogWorldExpo) and Facebook Pages.

Bebo is based in San Francisco and they have over 40 million members (Facebook has slightly over 50 million), and it’s more popular in the UK and with a younger crowd. According to CNET News, Bebo’s Open Media “will feature content from a variety of U.S. and U.K. outlets: CBS, MTV, ESPN, the BBC, Channel Four, ITN and BSkyB, and online media companies like Next New Networks, Crackle, Ustream and JibJab.”

Bebo is a member of Google’s OpenSocial initiative and and CNET says they are hinting that they have found a way to convert Facebook applications to their own platform. And then if it works on their platform, it will work on all the other platforms in the OpenSocial network. If this works it’s great news. If Facebook doesn’t join the open source push, they may not need to – if there are workarounds like this.

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