MySpace CEO says businesses should build sites around social media

“Businesses should start thinking about the web in a wholly different way and get to grips with the new “social layer” across the Internet,” was the message from both the San Francisco annual Web 2.0 Summit last week and the annual Monaco Media Forum held earlier this month.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, MySpace chief executive Mike Jones offered further insight on what this might mean for firms, arguing that “most businesses’ websites were wrong at the moment, as their organising principle was not social; it was more category-led”

He illustrated the change in outlook by giving the example of a clothes shop – “Imagine you go to a clothes shop’s website and you look up ‘shirts’, chances are you will pull up a list of shirts that the brand sells…. wouldn’t it be more interesting and valuable to know what shirts your friends or people with similar interests to you had previously bought or were thinking of buying?

But how these ideas translate and how they can be used by regular businesses is an important consideration according to the article. “Most businesses’ goal is to sell something of some sort. And one of the best ways to sell a product is socially. Offline, friends’ recommendations or referrals before purchase, has been around forever.”

How this might happen is beginning to emerge as well. Services like Facebook’s Connect, which enable people to use their Facebook login on participating sites, are according to the Telegraph “the early glimmers of people having a social passport, with a one password, across the web.”