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 f social-media networks are the new marketing archetype, then Shawn Gold is one of the foremost architects. Gold, senior vice president of marketing and content at social-media juggernaut MySpace.com, is at the epicenter of this strange — and significant — new world where online, offline, and in-person marketing can either collide into a new breed of organically grown community, or implode due to poorly conceived management. Corporate EVENT spoke with Gold about the nature of community in event marketing today, and why the Web might just be one of your most powerful tools for building it.
Corporate Event: Let’s be blunt: Is “community” just the undefined marketing buzzword du jour — like “brand” was a few years ago — or is there real and lasting power and meaning here?
Shawn Gold: Community is very different from brand. Still today there is no one definition of what brand means. Community is about connecting and sharing. At its core, it’s about self-expression and identification. For this generation, it is also about collaboration.
For marketers, community is an essential way to give people a tactile experience with their brand that has much more impact than a top-down encounter where a brand is broadcasting its values. Sharing thoughts and opinions about a brand from person to person through a community resonates in a much different way.
It’s not a trend. It’s something people strive for. And they have through the ages. What’s different today is the toolset that’s available to facilitate community building. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what a brand or company says, it matters what Google says. What MySpace says.
CE: What has MySpace tapped into that has made it such a model for information sharing and community building?
SG: When I was in high school, I didn’t smoke cigarettes. But my friends who did would go up to girls or other groups of people at the mall or the boardwalk and ask for a smoke or a light. That was the bridge to a conversation, instead of needing a line.
Today, people share information in the same way we offered a cigarette. They’re online, saying, “hey, check out this band, check out this clip, check out this product.” It’s a great bridge for communication and connection — and a lot healthier.
Everyone on MySpace is curating their personal brands through the friends they have, and the brands, images, music, and videos they like. They get feedback from strangers who are now considered online friends. They evolve their personal brand to complement this feedback. So they’re able to connect with like-minded people online, which ultimately makes for more efficient offline connections in the real world.
This fluidity doesn’t translate exactly to offline or in-person experiences. But it can be used in tandem, to make one and one equal three, for a much richer face-to-face experience.
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 sing online tools gives you tremendous power to collaborate about the event, find ways to improve content, and facilitate better connections with business partners. It’s really about empowerment and efficiency.
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CE: What is it about social media and event marketing together that adds up to more than the parts?
SG: When you wrap social media around an event, instead of having a single experience on site, your attendees can talk about it and see media about it before and after the actual event takes place. MySpace recently worked with Just For Laughs — the biggest comedy event in the world, held in Montreal. Starting two months ahead of time, we posted media from past events on MySpace. Prospective attendees could connect, plan, talk about their past experiences. They could see all the profiles, decide who looked like someone they wanted to meet, see if they were planning to attend. Then the event itself bridged the relationship.
It got people vested in the event ahead of time. And it gave the sponsors contact with a really significant number of people, including people who interacted with the content but didn’t necessarily attend the event. They built a stronger event ahead of time, then gave people a place to reconnect.
So at the end, instead of just saying “we had some signs at the event, great, they were part of our experience,” the event sponsor walked away with a database of people who had found them online — who were interested in their experience and participated in some way. This gives them a tremendous foundation for the next event.
Another company, PaidContent.org, did a great job creating a social network site around its own conference on social media that I attended. I was able to see who was attending, review their profiles, and learn ahead of time what they did. More important, I could see who was signed up for my panel so I could get a general understanding of who the audience would be so I could deliver information that would be more valuable.
Using online tools gives you tremendous power to collaborate about the event, find ways to improve content, and facilitate better connections with business partners. It’s really about empowerment and efficiency. You give people access to information about the things they really want to do, and the people they want to meet — and the ability to find the information and people faster. You can build this with the social-network sites that are already out there. This saves you from having to create your own event site, promote and market the site, and so on. There are already proven platforms available.
CE: What about event marketers who cater to a broad demographic — not just the Internet generation? Do the hallmarks of social media have meaning for these attendees?
SG: Of the 90 million adults between the ages of 35 and 64 who were online last month, 40 percent — 35 million — of them were on MySpace. It’s more efficient and more empowering than the old model of trying to reach someone on the phone. And since so many kids no longer even use e-mail, older generations are finding that you have to be where they are to stay connected.
Regardless of age, there are some core human needs that, if you find opportunities to address them with your events and their affiliated online social networks, you’ll find a strong platform for community. By my definition, those core needs are recognition, knowledge, self-expression, belonging, access, discovery, appreciation, and confidence. Look at how you can offer those things in person, and in your social-network environment. That’s how you win.
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 egardless of age, there are some core human needs that, if you find opportunities to address them with your events and their affiliated online social networks, you’ll find a strong platform for community.
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CE: So if everyone is already there, has already bought into this model, why is this such a challenge for marketers and brands to pull off?
SG: One thing about any community space: Your execution really has to be authentic, or the community will smell it out and out you. You have to really accept the good with the bad. Marketers worry about losing control, and having their messages positioned by the consumer. But that’s the genie out of the bottle: Consumers have always been in charge of the message.
Everyone has heard the stories about Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, and several car companies that have tried to create their own social network and community. The problem they have had when they tried to do this is they tried to keep it in a very limited, edited environment. You can’t control the messaging if you want a community to grow.
If you want to create community that works, it has to truly allow free expression. Let people say what they will about your event, learn from it, and build on it.
As long as you’re transparent, chiming into the conversation yourself can be a great thing do do — especially when the conversation is negative. People feel like you’re giving them an ear, and a slice of the power. When you have debate about a product or event, it lends credibility to the positive side of the story. All of these communities are self-correcting.
CE: Out of all this free expression, how is a prospective attendee sorting through an event-related social network to know what is real and what is not?
SG: Authentication is a really interesting process that the current generation goes through. Because there is so much greater access to information, they have to authenticate it more than any generation before them. If someone sends you a message on MySpace or posts a comment about an event, you’re going to check out that person. Is he for real? Is he who he says he is? What else does he like or dislike? People are constantly authenticating other people in a social-network environment.
CE: One of the ideas gaining some traction in certain event communities today is the unevent, in which a group convenes and essentially builds the agenda communally and on the fly. Do you think this approach — asking or encouraging your attendee community to create your event agendas ahead of time or as they arrive — is the future for all event marketers?
SG: There is always a macro theme. Otherwise it’s just a flash mob. You start, for example, with a group of techies. They have something in common and go to a gathering place to share that. It’s overromanticising to say there is no platform identified before the event begins.
You have to look at your attendees to really know if something meaningful is going to come from a nonevent approach. Take the wisdom-of-crowds concept. It essentially says that crowds make better decisions than individuals if they have the right toolset. But it doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes you get what is average from a crowd, not what is innovative.
So what’s important to know is this: For many events, the value is in the community itself. For me, there is less risk as an attendee if I know the audience is strong. The content no longer matters as much. Collaborating with great attendees is the key. I was looking at attending an event in Hawaii with no predetermined agenda. If the attendee group is smart and engaged, the simple act of working with them would be exciting and valuable, even if the output isn’t great. It’s the classic life scenario: the way of traveling is more important than the destination. e
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Shawn Gold is senior vice president of content and marketing for MySpace.com. He came to MySpace in 2006 after a 14-year history in digital marketing and business strategy. Before joining MySpace, Gold was publisher at Weblogs Inc. (now an AOL company), the largest publisher of professional blogs on the Web, including Engadget, AutoBlog, and Joystiq, with more than 8 million monthly readers. His Web-marketing innovations include the first interstitial ads on the Web and an advertising system based on time rotation and contextual integration, developed during his tenure with Icon New Media’s advertising division in the mid 90s. A published author and future cellist, he has 838 friends.
