But then news broke, first by TechCrunch, that Google planned to use Lala’s service as a back-end infrastructure for a new music search feature to enhance its overall search offering.

Then things got wilder, when Facebook suddenly pushed up its announcement that it, too, planned to unveil a Lala-based music plan. Rather than stick to its plan to begin a limited roll-out to a small percentage of Facebook users later this week, suddenly the social networking giant confirmed its overall plan. “All of a sudden, it was like ‘we were launching right now,’” says Nguyen.

He thinks traffic from Facebook alone could increase the number of songs doled out from Lala’s servers by an order of magnitude above the 5 million or so songs it currently delivers each month. While he won’t comfirm the Google deal, it’s pretty clear it’s coming.

Of course, it’s never had to deal with tens or hundreds of millions songs a month. As such, there remains the small question of execution. But if Nguyen & Co. can keep up with rising demand, the 35-person start-up may emerge as a company to reckon with amid thd digital music industry’s walking wounded. Never one to shy away from a bold prediction, he says that “I think we’ll be one of the top two or three retailers of music within a year.” That suggests that while Apple’s lead is safe, little Lala might catch Wal-Mart and will likely pass Best Buy, Amazon, Target and Borders.

There were excitable reports overnight that Google is about to launch its own music service. That is seemingly not the case. However, what Google IS doing is preparing to unveil richer music features within its main search engine.

Essentially, when users search for band names, they’ll bring up a “One Box” including a photo, biographical info and an option to stream preview clips and/or full streams from partners including Lala and iLike. There will also be prominent Buy MP3 buttons.

Separately, MySpace has launched the MySpace Artist Dashboard, which gives artists and labels better metrics on their profiles and streams on MySpace and MySpace Music. It integrates recent acquisition iLike’s own artist dashboard. Finally, MySpace Music now offers Buy links to iTunes as well as Amazon.

And finally… Facebook has its own new initiative to reveal: music gifting. The social network has been selling virtual items to Facebook users to give to their friends for some time, but now it’s added a Music and MP3s category, with partner Lala – a busy week for them.

Owen Van Natta, MySpace chief executive, is about to take the stage here at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Mr. Van Natta, who joined the News Corp.-owned social network in April, comes bearing some modest news: MySpace will expand its selection of music videos and make them more prominent in its search results, profile pages and on a “New Music Video” hub.

In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Van Natta laid out some of his plans to stem the decline. In the five months since he joined the company, he has hired a new executive team, started cleaning up the site’s clunky, ad-choked interface, and acquired the social music service iLike in an effort to expand MySpace’s reach beyond the confines of its own social network.

“Over 100 millions users per month are socializing on our products,” Mr. Van Natta said. “It’s a massive audience and they are extremely engaged. There is a lot of clutter, so people can’t do as much as they should. But if we can make the site easier to use, and introduce new things, we can increase their engagement without necessarily increasing their time on the site.”

iLike is also part of the new Google music service we wrote about Wednesday, which means song clips from MySpace will be available to people searching for artists and songs on Google.

And those deals, Mr. Van Natta indicated, are just the beginning of his effort to syndicate MySpace content across the Web.

“I believe strongly that the future of web is openness and distribution,” Mr. Van Natta said. “People’s behavior on the Web will get more atomized over time and you have to embrace that. People want to embrace these things in different places.”

Businesses have embraced online communities as a means of communicating with their customers—and for good reason. An online community offers unmatched opportunities for customers, prospects, advocates, and fans to support and engage in conversation about their favorite brands in a brand-safe environment.

Yet building a successful online community isn't as easy as it might seem. A thriving community requires defined goals and a clear strategy if it is to consistently attract and engage participants. Below are five tips to help you build an online community.

1. Determine your goal
2. Identify metrics
3. Develop a marketing plan
4. Identify monetization goals and strategy—brand-building vs. monetization
5. Determine how you'll build it

MySpace is in late stage negotiations to acquire music streaming service iMeem, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. MySpace is on a bit of an acquisition spree – they acquired iLike, another music service, three months ago.

We don’t know the price of the acquisition, but this isn’t going to be a big win for investors. iMeem has raised at least $25 million (that we’ve been able to track) plus at least another $10 million in debt. But the difficultly in making a free streaming music service work as a business model forced them to make some hard decisions. Earlier this year they renegotiated label contracts and recapitalized the company, bringing in $6 million in fresh capital.

What’s in it for MySpace – the acquisition of a seasoned team with lots of experience in music. Plus the iMeem and SNOCAP intellectual property.

"It would be silly to count us out," says Jason Hirschhorn, who, with Mike Jones, runs the company as co-president. They replaced Owen Van Natta, who was jettisoned as CEO last month after less than 10 months on the job.

They have their work cut out. MySpace, a unit of News Corp. Digital, has stumbled through two CEO resignations in the past year, while Facebook and Twitter surged. (Van Natta's predecessor, Chris DeWolfe, left in April 2009.) Nonetheless, MySpace remains one of the Internet's most enduring brands. It is profitable, and it is expected to haul in more than $350 million in revenue this year — mostly from ads.

MySpace is moving back to its original DNA: appealing to self-expressive, creative under-35-year-olds who are into games, music and movies. More than half of MySpace's estimated 100 million users are 25 and younger, according to market researcher ComScore. The 13-to-34-year-old demographic spends 84% of all user time on the service.

"Their brand was born in the music community, as a hub for attracting bands and fans," says Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora, an online music service."There still is a tremendous loyalty toward MySpace, and it is a monster audience. They were the first mass destination and home for DIY artists. Bands remember that."

"The game isn't over for (MySpace)," Owyang says. "They still have a strong foothold, the opportunity to try new tactics, if their management team — and internal culture — can quickly come into alignment."

Says Hirschhorn, "We will always be culturally relevant. And we'll be here in five, 10 years."

Here's the twist: You can't find the deal in any newspaper or magazine. It doesn't exist in print, only on Facebook.

That's a switch for corporations, seeking to advertise their wares.

'Digital couponing’ like Monday’s offer also allows companies to track how well their Facebook page is doing in attracting potential costumers.

“With social media, it’s hard to see how many people are visiting your site,” said Mr. Simonds. “When you give them a promotional code to bring when they go to the store, you know who’s been on your Facebook page.”

True to form, many of the technologies showcased during New York's annual Internet Week wowed, but what really generated attention were efforts to answer the $64,000 question: How do we measure the value of a Facebook fan, especially since Facebook is a dominant part of a marketer's toolkit?

Synapse, for instance, assigns the average value of a fan at $136.38, and Vitrue pegs the value of a Facebook fan at $3.60.

Synapse in the study:

Product spending -- Facebook fans spend, on average, $71.84 more than non-fans over a two-year period.
Loyalty (meaning ability to influence and promote brand loyalty within a target audience) -- Facebook fans are 28% more likely to continue using a brand than consumers who are not fans on Facebook.
Propensity to recommend -- 68% of fans are "very likely" to recommend a product to family and friends (as opposed to 28% of non-fans).
Brand affinity -- 81% of fans feel a connection to the brand (versus only 39% of non-fans).

David Armano, senior VP, Edelman Digital, observed in a session on Facebook; we would do well to think of Facebook as part of a larger marketing "ecosystem" where there are practical and actionable set of measures like customer lifetime value, acquisition costs and sales.

There is a rising chorus of voices demanding a coordinated industry approach to metrics and methodology used in the measurement of social media that integrates the disparate trade organizations' efforts while introducing the best thinking from innovative companies like Synapse and Vitrue. This will allow the industry to come up with an accepted standard set of metrics that provide true actionability.

Nielsen recently published a study stating that 79% of Fortune 100 companies are leveraging social media to engage their audience, and they are doing it in innovative ways to build buzz, establish relationships, foster communication, improve products, and cultivate long-term brand awareness and consumer trust.

Social media is ultimately about relationships. It should be viewed as a two-way street. As a brand, you aren’t there to promote a product, you are there to communicate and relate. If you approach social media with sales as your end goal, your audience will notice and, most likely, you will be ignored.

1) Raise brand awareness by hosting an online game or contest
2) Drive valuable traffic to your social network with a free giveaway
3) Grow consumer loyalty by giving consumers a stake in your brand
4) Build brand equity by aligning with a higher purpose

Contests are a core way to drive participation on your Ning Network and keep members coming back.

1. Relevancy
Make sure the topic or theme of the promotion is relevant and interesting to your members. This will help shape your promotion and ultimately drive participation. Provide creative goalposts to encourage the submission of compelling creative.

2. Keep it simple
Design the promotion to make it accessible to as many members as possible. Create clear and transparent rules to inform and aid in the vetting of submissions.

3. Spread the word
Send a broadcast message to alert your members to the promotion and provide timely updates.

4. Compelling prizes
Attention and recognition prizes are often as valuable as cash prizes. People love getting recognition

5. Measure your success
Predetermine a set of metrics prior to launching your promotion that will help you measure success

We hear so much about the “best practices” in social media and what they’re doing right.  Won’t there be much more to learn from their journey to social media success, rather than the success itself?

1. Don’t force yourself into the conversation
2. You CAN be too personal
3. You can’t just jump in and expect success.
4. You have to show results.
5. Separation of personal and professional networks for employees.
6. There is such a thing as too much content.
7. Social Media is an addition, not a replacement.
8. Social media is not an end.
9. Know your audience.
10. Reward the customers that want to be rewarded.
11. Use what you have first.
12. Learn along the way.

The move could potentially see MySpace music and video footage being shared on Facebook via its Connect platform, which allows people to log into third party sites using their Facebook ID.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, told The Telegraph: “Facebook is focussing on building the best technology which helps people share content, while at MySpace they are focussing on more a content-led strategy. We would like to have their content, as we already do with many other sites, shared across our network because it is good for our users.

When asked how the partnership could work, Ms Sandberg explained: “Hypothetically speaking, as nothing has been formally arranged yet, MySpace could become a Facebook Connect partner – which would allow people to share content they liked from MySpace with their Facebook network.”

Owen Van Natta, MySpace’s chief executive, formerly Facebook’s chief revenue officer, also confirmed the two companies are in talks. Since joining the company in April earlier this year, Mr Van Natta has refocused MySpace, moving it away from being a social networking platform which directly rivals Facebook.
He says the product is now “a platform where people socialise around content” and is aiming for MySpace to become the place where people find and share music, TV, films and games.