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We can kick your social network’s a**!

The year was 1995. The then first-term mayor of New York city Rudy Giuliani was making his third nationally televised appearance on the CBS program “Late Show With David Letterman.” They were doing this bit where Mr. Letterman offered the mayor a chance to select a new slogan to increase tourism in New York City. Speaking to camera with great gusto, Mr. Giuliani picked from among the slogans and famously uttered these words, which were simultaneously flashed live on the Jumbotron in Times Square: “We can kick your city’s ass.” This, as David Firestone wrote in the New York Times at the time, was one of those moments that helped to “burnish [Rudy Giuliani's] reputation for creative political pugilism.”

Of course, as is the stock and trade of late night television, this was all just “schtick.” A joking motto. Yet it captured, in Mayor Giuliani’s own words, “the spirit of the city.”

What’s up with the throwback trivia? This recent post from Heather Dougherty, director of research at Hitwise, about the geographic divide of social networks caught my eye. And, as you will soon see, gives the mayor’s famous quote brand new meaning for today’s MySpace and Facebook crowd.

While it’s never taken much to fan the flames of local city pride, not least between New York City on the East Coast and Los Angeles on the West, it now appears top social network sites MySpace and Facebook are not as borderless or as untethered to the offline world as we might have thunk. Especially when it comes to the big US cities.

To review, MySpace continues to be the largest social network in the US, according to Hitwise. It’s market share of visits was 3.5x that of Facebook for the week ending July 19, 2008. But Facebook is gaining. It’s traffic grew 23% when compared to the same week last year while MySpace was down 29%. But size is one thing. Where the users are located, blogs Heather, is another:

We have recently launched a tool at Hitwise where our clients can access DMA® level data for both websites and categories to understand the share of traffic from local regions. As an example… for the 4 weeks ending July 19, 2008… the top DMA for MySpace is LA while the top DMA for Facebook is NYC- which is not surprising considering that these two cities are the 2 largest DMAs in overall size and tend to be significant for most national websites.

When comparing the DMAs of the 2 websites to one another, an interesting trend pops out – MySpace visitors are more likely to be located on the west coast while Facebook has heavier representation on the East Coast (the coasts where each company was started). The 20 DMAs with the highest representation index for MySpace when compared to Facebook, meaning the likelihood of the visitor to go to MySpace vs. Facebook… are all located on the west coast. The trend is also illustrated… when looking at the top 10 DMAs for MySpace, where the West Coast DMAs dominate. When the situation is reversed to compare Facebook to MySpace, the East Coast and Midwest becomes more prevalent.

Does this mean MySpace is a social network that is like, omg, totally hot and Facebook is a place where it’s better to fuggetaboutit? Could Facebook make good on the former mayor’s motto and kick, in a digital minute, some MySpace gluteus maximus? Me, I’m a New Yorker and a Facebook member. So how you doin’?

Wherever your networking takes you, the Hitwise’s DMA research helps to underscore a point that often gets missed in the social media discussion today: how there’s actually a strong link between offline social networks and their online counterparts. Between citizens and netizens. Grassroots and netroots. Between those we friend and those who simply are our friends.

And while I couldn’t agree more that the world is increasingly flat, it’s clear our burgeoning digital shoots still have some very real world roots–and possibly some geographic limitations. Even for the top social networking sites going in the US today.

For more background on the inter-relationship between offline and online social networks, see Now that you’re blogging, don’t forget face-to-face. And let us know your thoughts about MySpace and Facebook. I’ll be doing some friends-and-family research of my own in the meantime starting with our New York and LA offices. Now how do you think that will go? Fuggetaboutit!

Image credit: www.thephoenix.com