Home › Blogs › Michael Connery's blog ›

MTV Keeps Innovating - New Social Network and Immigration Forum

It's an MTV-packed day. I just got two items in my inbox alerting me to some more political innovation from MTV.

The first comes from Josh Levy of Tech President, who alerted me to the fact that later today MTV is set to launch Think MTV, a social networking site focused on activism and politics that will incorporate some video features similar to YouTube.

Levy notes that this may be a sign of MTV's desperation to compete against companies like FaceBook, MySpace and YouTube who are invading their market share and have probably long since eclipsed the network at the cutting edge of youth culture. I see Levy's point, and I've long been skeptical of attempts by companies and organizations to set up their own social networks, yet the Think MTV site looks pretty slick, and with their 50-state Vlogger strategy, MTV certainly will have a lot of interesting content to populate the video feeds. Right now Think MTV is only open to 14 year olds through "recent college grads" and non profits with verifiable EIN numbers. I've applied for PR "invite" to the site and will write a thorough review if I get access.

The second item to hit my inbox in the last couple hours is a press release for a forum on Immigration at Cal State University in Los Angeles. The event will be held on September 29th and will be immediately followed by the premier of True Life: I Live on the Border, a documentary about three young people on different sides of the issue.

I found MTVs contributions in 2004 to be somewhat lackluster, but they are really taking the lead this cycle in developing compelling media strategies to engage young people in both the election and more esoteric public policy discussions. I think maybe an in-depth, birdseye view of their activities is in order, as well as some digging into how this radical change in their election programming came about.

Bookmark/Search this post with:
  • Delicious
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • Propeller
  • Reddit
  • Magnoliacom
  • Newsvine
  • Furl
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • Yahoo
  • Technorati
  • Icerocket
September 20th, 2007 2:56pm
Tags:

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

what MTV stands for

Submitted by KevinH on Thu, 2007-09-20 15:43.

I wonder if MTV's lack of effectiveness in 2004, and the general failure of their "Choose or Lose" campaign, is traceable to their declining credibility amongst their target audience. Once upon a time, MTV played music in more than 2.5 minute clips for the half hour of TRL. I haven't seen ratings, but once-edgy events such as the VMAs are now just hackneyed imitations of "traditional" awards shows, with occasional half-baked attempts to pretend that it is anything more than industry-promotion. Gone even are the days of MTV News, which was moderately successful in its educational goals.

In short, while MTV's efforts this cycle are, as Mike points out, pretty darn cool, their chances of success may be hampered by the massive shift in their on-air programming, where their shows are not really much more youth-focused than anything on Bravo or E!.

I agree

Submitted by Michael Connery on Fri, 2007-09-21 10:38.

I tend to agree. Their partnership with MySpace is the most interesting part of this arrangement, in that it is at least getting back to "where the youth are." It will be interesting to see if we can find out how much traffic and participation in the debate came from MTV.com vs. MySpace.

I tend to think MTV's real value here is as a rebroadcaster. They will r-air these dialogues repeatedly on their college station MTV U and a couple other places.

As for rehabilitating their street cred, I'm looking to see how they handle these vloggers. That could be pretty significant for the network (though even if it is not, it will be awesome for local bloggers and political institutions who connect with those vloggers).

asdf

Submitted by Jake Thorn on Thu, 2007-09-20 19:59.

heard a blurb about this awhile back and now they've launched, oh lordy. first, i love the title --- quite the oxymoron. I can't really conceive of a Viacom-owned network letting its members undertake any particularly compelling causes, because those types of causes tend to polarize --- their "Take Action" section is already lame as fark, pro-establishment, safe, status quo BS, just what I'd expect. real activists rock the boat. anything with an MTV logo attached to it will never be a part of that, because they own the damn boat.

even from spending just ten minutes on the site, I can already sense the top-heavy feel, and in a really really bad way. the Iraq section, for example, doesn't really take a stand --- it's wishy washy as fuck. note all the "if" you're against the war, and the fact that it first sets out to tell you that there's "no denying" the war is having an "impact" on the world---talk about setting the bar low. clearly, this site is designed merely not to offend anybody, not to empower or impassion people. it's plastic. lame. typical corporate BS. the only thing that can save them is if they have a creative, proactive userbase and that's unlikely to happen because those people will know to stay away.

***********

http://www.losethelabel.org/

Wait and see

Submitted by Michael Connery on Fri, 2007-09-21 10:41.

I'm gonna wait and see. I take all of your points, Jake, but I don't think that MTV is going to have all that much editorial control over those vlogers, and if they're smart, they'll maintain almost no control (beyond DMCA bullshit) over the content of users. They're a corporation, so yeah, the stock content that it uploaded at the beginning will suck. But as people use it, the entire thing could morph into something interesting/useful.

The question is, with FaceBook and MySpace already offering so many of the same features, will people use it?

it's also curious to me that they wouldn't just put that development work into MySpace. They're already partnering with the social network and they're owned by the same damned companies.