Harper Teen Books
Via Profy, I see that HarperTeen, the teen imprint of Harper Collins, have bought a sponsored page on MySpace to promote their books.
It’s a lot better space than their more corporate site, which definitely lacks any interaction options, and has so far attracted over 22k friends. The biggest draw however appears to be the competition to write a short piece and win $5k. This closes today for entries and them moves into the reader voting stage, where 10 favourites are chosen by the judges and the site visitors get to vote. The challenge for the company will be to keep the interaction going after the competition, when the attraction is the books and talking about the books.
The releases about the deal describe it as a partnership, although it looks like a media buy with ‘added value’, which may be additional promotional activity etc. This would be an answer to the question on Profy as to why it is only one company; it’s not MySpace looking to build teen literature, it’s a media buy from a company that MySpace see some value in adding some things to the deal.
From a user perspective, the risk will be that the campaign is timebound and if a community develops around the profile, it may go poof at some point if funding dried up. At that point the profile can always switch to unpaid (and unpromoted) if it’s a success.
