By Anne Holland, President

I've been hearing incredible buzz about MySpace for the past year. 

More than 82 million MySpace members and counting -- that's a huge media destination to spring almost out of nowhere in nine months of server-quaking growth. 

As the leader of a research firm, I've been tracking MySpace's size rather than participating in the phenomenon. That's probably because I'm not hip, I'm not cool and I'm not remotely near 12-17, which is the age group nearly 60% of MySpace members belong to.

This weekend as I was shopping Memorial Day specials online, I surfed over to MySpace to see what all the fuss is about. My 21-year old stepson was in the room so I called over, "Hey, do you know about this MySpace thing?"

"Oh yeah," he said.  "I've got my own site there."

"You do?!" I was stunned he had a site I knew nothing about. "Oh, Anne," he said in a 'Duh' tone, "Everybody has a MySpace account. Heck even Betty has one."

That's right. Our family dog, Betty Boop, has a MySpace account, and as it turns out, she has an ongoing blog there as well at  http://www.myspace.com/bettyboopdog 

I'm about to go into our weekly editorial meeting, and I bet you can guess what I'm going to assign the research team. Yup, a special report on marketing and social networking sites. If you've conducted any tests and have lessons learned to share, please contact our Editorial Director at TadC(at)MarketingSherpa(dot)com.

Thanks -- and looking forward to those research results!