Back when personal brands were just a twinkle in society’s collective eye, one social network ruled our lives: MySpace.
It was where you went to post passive aggressive comments on your high school frenemies’ walls. It was the source of anguish as you jockeyed for position in the Top Eights of your besties. It was something you accessed via Sidekick if your parents were cool enough to let you get one.
Most of all, it was a social media account you pretty much forgot about when you got to college — but it’s still out there, and it’s still armed with pictures of you in ironic graphic tees and Uggs. And now, the social network is trying to blackmail users into revisiting the site through a mass email that reads, “Your Photos, Redelivered. The good, the rad, and the what were you thinking…”
That’s right, MySpace is trying to lure you back in by reminding you that somewhere in its coffers, there are photos of you chugging jungle juice from a red Solo cup in the parking lot at Blink-182. It’s a pretty genius marketing strategy. Who could resist such a potent mix of train wreck and time capsule?
A MySpace spox wouldn’t divulge whether people were biting or not when asked by Mashable, but said the site is making an effort to reach out to current and past users to “re-engage them through a personalized experience,” which somehow sounds ominous in this context.
Thanks anyway, Tom, but next time we want to walk down memory lane back into the 2000s, we’ll settle for a screening of Mean Girls.