MySpace Facelifts COO+CPO: Michael Jones, Jason Hirschhorn
Fox Chief Digital Officer Jon Miller is a busy recruiter these days. After bringing in Owen Van Natta as new CEO, Michael Jones (formerly of Userplane which sold to Miller’s AOL, and recently Tsavo Agency) and Jason Hirschhorn (formerly President of Sling Media and CDO of MTV Networks) as COO and CPO (Chief Product Officer), respectively. Think “AOL + MTV [x Facebook] = New MySpace.” After the jump, insight into where this troika takes MySpace to innovate the social network/portal.
With the announcements come speculation that MySpace will become more competitive with Facebook in terms of serious utility, but with a stronger version of voice or content destination to lure users who (one day) may tire of the Twitter-like personal branding and communication which Facebook owns.
Think AOL + MTV [x Facebook] = New MySpace
Michael Jones created Tsavo Agency as a SEO and content monetization agency (not too dissimilar from New Medici Consulting but concentrating specifically in search optimization), while also creating Tsavo.com, a parentco. (“Publishing content tailored for you” – tagline) leveraging acquired audience niches, aggregation and original blog niche sites (plug: think NewMedici.com network of blogs path).
- Daymix.com (info/news aggregator)
- Twirlit.com (female niche – think Gawker’s Jezebel.com)
- Manolith.com (male niche – think Glam’s Brash.com)
- Kidglue.com (kid niche – think Nick/Noggin)
- Nibbledish.com (food niche – think Delish/Y! Food)
Running these sites, the SEO/monetization agency and really trying to be on the edge of social media makes Michael a good operations/product person who knows how to staff and deliver against his business properties.
Jones is the AOL part of the equation (under Jon Miller), with his sale of Userplane to the early portal.
Jason Hirschhorn, on the other hand, has been the music and video product head of MTV and Sling Media.
His sale of his first network of music sites – Mischief New Media – to Viacom eventually led to his Chief Digital role under Judy McGrath, where he also oversaw MTV Overdrive.
From there, he joined Blake Krikorian at Sling, the popular creator of Slingbox, allowing content consumption away from one’s DVR; Jason ran all content partnerships and built Sling.com, the beta site to aggregate content much like Hulu.
As well, Hirschhorn aggregates for the must-read “Media ReDEFined” email newsletter, aka media aggregator, via Feedburner.
Hirschhorn is the MTV part of the equation.
So where does this point MySpace: initially, it shores up the left and right brains of the product side to redesign MySpace’s architecture and product release strategy.
All three of the heads are product-side ready from Facebook to Userplane/AOL to MTV/Sling to redo the site’s utility. Hirschhorn’s ability to integrate that product with content, with Jones’ ability to build out better SEO management (something that matters to users a lot, especially with Google’s search deal ending with MySpace), equals great backend context to rebrand the network as a new place that operates as easily and viral as Facebook.
Back to the equation:
AOL (Miller/Jones) + MTV (Hirschhorn) [x Facebook (Van Atta)] = Enhanced MySpace Product Play
With a stronger product, it now comes time for them to retool the content (think General Manager type), marketing and sales (last two could be combined or separated which we think is necessary given the audience size) of the company.
We don’t want to point at the obvious, but look at past AOL partnerships and acquisitions to see where some of the hires will arrive from. No, they’re probably not still at AOL, but look at where they went next, to see where Miller may be calling/recruiting.
Perhaps we’ll create a ranking system like Techcrunch. In our next post:
(GM X) Content + (Y Exec) Marketing + (Z Rev Person) Sales = Enhanced MySpace Content Play