Another company takes aim at MySpace: Wal-Mart??

Filed under: Web services, Social Software

Another company takes aim at MySpace: Wal-Mart??

by Jordan Running Jul 18th 2006

I love the title of this Advertising Age article: Wal-Mart Tries to Be MySpace-Seriously. Because it's so apropos. If you were asked to name 50 companies poised to capture the hearts and minds of hip, young Americans, I doubt Wal-Mart would be on, or even anywhere near, your list. But that doesn't stop it from trying: The HUB (School Your Way) is Wal-Mart's answer to MySpace, and it's worth partial credit at best. The HUB allows young Wal-Mart shoppers-the site seems aimed mostly at tweens-to put together their own personalized page with the opportunity to "win some fab prizes." They can also upload a video of themselves, but all content is rigidly controlled by Wal-Mart, so don't expect to see much in the way of free expression (oh, and the only teens featured on the site's front page are paid actors and models). In the end, Wal-Mart's HUB is-as thought it's not obvious-much less a social networking site (in fact, social networking features are all but absent) and much more an attempt by Wal-Mart to get kids to run its advertising campaign for it, and from the sounds of the Advertising Age article, kids aren't too interested, and I can see why.

Tags: advertising, marketing, myspace, schoolyourway, socialnetworking, socialsoftware, teen, thehub, walmart

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Chris Gilmer said 9:53AM on 7-18-2006

It should be fun to read all the stories about how hackers, and spammers infiltrate this walmart social network to serve porn, ringtones, smilie downloads, and viagara ads.

What has the internet come to? Walmart is not cool.

jakev said 2:05PM on 7-24-2006

besides the fact that it plains sucks, you aren't allowed to customize it.

click my site to see what I'm talking about.

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