MySpace’s “loss of face” to Facebook, a rough and tumble economy and a pivotal change of company seats, i.e., Peter Chernin, at News Corp (and MySpace’s own COO and senior technical team’s exodus) has contributed to a major executive facelift of MySpace. While their track record of change with Jeff Berman as President of Sales and Marketing and pitch towards being framed as a “social portal” has helped, the inability to keep up with Facebook’s growth rate and product innovation has forced change at MySpace. With the forthcoming announcement (today) by new CDO Jon Miller of former Facebook COO, Owen Van Natta, to the CEO spot, Fox and Murdoch are betting on social competitiveness to regain position. After the jump, we’ll look at Van Natta, and outside choice, Jason Calacanis’ recommendations.

Owen Van Natta

While the writing has been on the social graph wall for more than year - that MySpace’s top position was being eroded by Facebook’s growth and clever use of Facebook Connect to open up the platform - there has also been a fair amount of desk shifting for Van Natta.

Via Kara Swisher at All Things D, Van Natta was always a number two to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Sheryl Sandberg left Google to become Facebook’s current COO.

Even with well-measured positions at Amazon (should be interesting to see how NBC-Fox’s Hulu with former Amazoner Jason Kilar and Van Natta partner), Van Natta received credit for the Microsoft investment giving Facebook a short-lived $15B valuation.

When Van Natta took the CEO position at Project Playlist, it appears to be because he aspired to the CEO position, and wasn’t interested in the presidency of MySpace Music, which MTV’s Courtney Holt eventually seized.

Also at play were the lucrative 2-year compensation deals for MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe and President Tom Anderson - whereby they made $15M/year each, with some equity in MySpace China.

With such generous founder’s fees, so to speak, being levied within a corporate media company like News Corp, the amount of pressure was high to hit a $1B annual revenue target and stay ahead of the pack of social networks.

All said and done, when Rupert Murdoch decided to not pay Peter Chernin, his COO and most likely a CEO-in-desire, his approximately $30M/year in salary, it also made sense to capsize MySpace’s leadership, at that same rate when combined.

From left field, although Jason Calacanis (current Mahalo.com CEO and former Weblogs Inc CEO, which sold to AOL for $25M and gave Jason the Netscape position) is most likely on a short list for the Myspace position, he still promotes the personal branding and initiative that are great for startups but don’t always fare well in executive corporations.

Calacanis create a list of changes that MySpace has to consider, which was sent to his 14k strong newsletter.

Via Calacanis.com and SAI’s The New MySpace CEO’s First 10 Tasks.:

1. Buy a search engine
2. Admit Facebook is beating you on the Web and focus on owning mobile
3. Double down on global efforts
4. Parallel rebuilding of the MySpace platform
5. Focus on Building a Huge Social and Casual Gaming Business
6. Build a MySpace Virtual Currency
7. MySpace should launch a full-blown email service with a partner.
8. MySpace’s new CEO should build a team bonus program based on unique visitors and page views
9. Meet with top members and run a gazillion focus groups
10. Buy or build a network of high-value content sites

Looking at this list, there are clever plays such as going mobile with “Mobile  SNS” (a  play on SMS, but dealing with social network services for mobile phones), and monetizing the entertainment (gaming, virtual currencies and email services).

Calacanis basically argues for MySpace to speed up its Yahoo! and former AOL intentions, before they make their own recoveries.

As well, there’s a number of “here’s how I’ll fine tune the staff” with bonuses based on site traffic growth, and or becoming the first social network to 1 billion users.

What is more interesting is going down the line with creating more high-value niche content sites and media groups that can categorize users and see the site as having a social voice that speaks to its individual communities, as opposed to being a social utility like Facebook, with little personalization to pop culture and music areas.

Our own “New Medici” thoughts, polled internally, are:

1. Go further with the social portal idea and continue to create the best solutions for marketers and advertisers. Provide ways to really marry brands and pop culture (entertainment, music, etc.) to the editorial and community content. Roll up the blog networks like BuzzNet (Buzz Media), Techcrunch and possibly even Glam into the mix.
2. Tone down the advertising bling or blink. Create a new creative ad standards team that puts the brightest creatively with the sales team to create “breakthrough ads” that don’t interfere with the experience.
3. Promote social/personal branding across the site’s segments and especially to the users. Initially, MySpace was about created your own individually skinned page that made you stand out from others and create a social life online. As Facebook used better and cleaner architecture and site design, people began to want to employ the utilitarian network (i.e., Facebook profile) as their personal page. However, now with over 200M users, being on Facebook is like trying to stand out in China - a lot of smiling people, but nobody shines. MySpace redux could re-individualize the user, minus the Pimp MySpace, more puerile branding.
4. Multi-level marketing - create a social-oriented affiliate program where power-users/influencers can make money by bringing their fans back to a new, stronger (more brandable) MySpace. Think WineLibraryTV’s Gary Vaynerchuk realizing that on MySpace he can add tens to hundreds of thousands of users to his viewing audience, but also sell wine and other accessories simultaneously - which he cannot do at Facebook even though they’ve gifted him as an influencer with his own personal vanity Facebook link: www.facebook.com/gary.
5. On top of the social portal of niche content and influencers, integrate the Wall Street Journal and other News Corp brands into the mix with a business focus. When I decided to reinvigorate my Facebook profile last year, I did so because I saw it becoming more of a business utility; everyone was joining including the exec/entrepreneurial set, so it made sense to use it as a tool, much like LinkedIn has been over the years. It’s time to roll-up other relevant social networks, like LinkedIn, which I still argue is a natural fit for News Corp/Fox for roughly $1B. LinkedIn is as much a utility as Facebook, and it’s a tool MySpace is missing as its users matriculate to the job market.