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McClatchy: Defending or Defensive?   Sallie Mae: Are You With Us, Lord?
Dec 28 2007 10:21AM EST

MySpace Is This, And Your Space is That

While the act of parsing judgment often simply produces a good giggle at the expense of bosses or flacks who insist on generating corporate babble, it can also often be quite revelatory. In business, more often than not, words from the CEO can give big clues about business strategy (or sometimes, the lack thereof).

So in signing off for the year, Jack Flack leaves you with one last parsing nugget for 2007.

Already sensitive enough to Facebook's recent privacy woes to provide Mark Zuckerberg a nice Rescue Memo on dealing properly with the Beacon PR trauma, Jack Flack smelled competitive strategy in the works when he read Jon Swartz's USAT piece on MySpace a few days ago.

MySpace Co-founder Chris DeWolfe provided Swartz with this telling money-quote.

"We're offering one place where people are in control," DeWolfe coolly explains at an L.A. restaurant near MySpace's offices, cradling a cocktail.

The line somehow smells more meaningful than a random, off-the-cuff quip for a reporter. In fact, it seems like a pretty nice way to encapsulate a competitive positioning strategy as MySpace works furiously to get its mojo back.

How so?

By promising to be the social network where the people are in control, MySpace is implicitly framing up Facebook as the place where somebody else is in control. Who? Maybe advertisers and others interested in your data.

Is this a concept MySpace will push? Dunno. Many a geek thinks that all social networking sites are nothing but data vampires. To them, such a strategy would probably seem like Dunkin' Donuts attacking Krispy Kreme for having more carbs. But everything is relative in this consumer world of ours, and MySpace surely feels plenty of pressure to get back on the front foot with the smaller, but fast-rising Facebook.

And, oh yeah, who owns MySpace these days?

Ah, right, those guys are not very competitive. And besides, they're far too fair and balanced to grind away at a competitor's weakness.

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