Right-leaning British newspaper The Daily Mail found itself with egg on its face on Friday as one of its infamously non-neutral polls was targeted by psychologists on twitter.

The poll which had the decidedly non-neutral question ’should the nhs let gipsies to jump the queue?’, raised the ire of a number of psychologists who as part of their research staunchly defend questionnaire neutrality.

An email and tweet campaign got under way encouraging people to vote yes on the poll, and so it was that right-wing rag saw 96% of the polled answering yes (with traffic that apparently almost crashed the newspaper’s server).

An interesting story in itself, but one with lessons for bands/writers/ businesses trying to promote themselves online. Hold on now! We’re not suggesting you start posting xenophobic poll questions in a tacky bid to increase your hits! No, but this combination of normal polling with email and twitter can be a great and powerful way to boost traffic.

An example: you’re a writer, so you put a poll on your site asking ‘who is the most important novelist of the last 5 years?’. You send out details of the poll to your email list – if you have one. You send it out to your facebook friends, and you post a link on twitter (making sure that the title of the tweet is short and snappy enough to encourage plenty of re-tweets).

Former Facebook COO Van Natta, who is currently involved in playlist.com, a tool for sharing music on various social platforms, is apparently set to take  over the role of CEO for MySpace. Various tech sites have reported the news that Van Natta is to take over from MySpace founder Chris DeWolfe, including the Wall Street Journal’s online magazine All things Digital (owned, like Myspace, by Newscorp – so they should have a good idea).

It’s an interesting development for MySpace, which most agree has lost a lot of momentum to Facebook in terms of the Social Networking market.  In terms of media-buzz it may seem like MySpace is a dying beast, but it’s still a hugely important network – above all else for musicians and bands. Do you know any musician, either starting out or selling millions of records, who isn’t on MySpace but is on Facebook?

Van Natta’s appointment at MySpace will, no doubt, lead to some major developments at the network – whether that’s going to change the average profile of users remains to be seen. 

In our local universe though, dealing with bands who want to establish an online presence, our advice is still the same:

Yes, you do need a MySpace profile

and

No, it’s not enough to just have a MySpace profile.

Stay tuned to the blog for our upcoming post on an integrated online strategy for bands and musicians.