The Summer 2010 has vastly outpaced previous issues in visits during the initial launch. Totals for the three most recent issues are:

• Summer ’09: 2700 visits in first four weeks
• Fall ’09: 1200 visits in first four weeks
• Summer ’10: 3000 visits in first two weeks

The increase seems to be due primarily to Facebook, which accounted for 1200 visits

These are still modest numbers, as you’d expect from a small college. But look at the dramatic improvement. Part of this is likely because we have more facebook fans than for the last issue (we’ve added nearly 1,000 since I started in February.), but that just emphasizes my larger point that engaging people in the community where they want to be engaged means gains for whatever you’re trying to promote.

When it came time to announce our ideas, every group had the same theme: MySpace for ___. One group wanted to make MySpace for pets. Another wanted to make MySpace into a glossy print product featuring high school athletes. You get the idea.

When we were leaving, I asked my publisher what she thought, and she was pretty pleased with all of the ideas. Her take was that MySpace was so successful, why shouldn’t we use their idea to make money? What she missed was that MySpace (and Facebook, and Google, and Flickr and any number of other successful ideas) succeeded because it did something new and interesting. Taking an idea and barely re-working it doesn’t qualify as innovation. Especially when you miss the point entirely, like the glossy magazine people did.

As I’m writing this, I logged into MySpace for the first time in weeks. In 2006, I logged in every day. If you’d have told me then that things like Facebook and Twitter would have replaced that, I don’t know if I’d have believed you. And I’m sure the reaction at the conference would have been along the lines of “What’s Twitter?”

There are plenty of great ideas floating around out there, and people in the media have them. Instead of trying to just re-purpose things that other people have done, we need to implement those truly new and original ideas.