Within 5 miles of where I'm sitting with this laptop, there are 1,977 twenty-nine year-old female voters with a graduate degree who self-identify as Democrats on Myspace. That's crazy. It's crazy MySpace lets me search  with that much demographic specificity. Seriously.

There are currently more liberals on MySpace than conservatives. This is a huge resource for any campaign that has the sense to harness it.

Advomatic has hacked some code for MySpace profiles to interface with Drupal sites at a whole new level. But before any of those innovations, I used the out-of-the-box MySpace tools to recruit and coordinate my volunteers in a 2005 election.  I used MySpace to register voters. I even used MySpace to operate a 72 hour-out GOTV push. After we won, used MySpace to coordinate with my former MySpace captains as they became office interns in City Hall.  

I didn't do this to prove a point.  My workhorse volunteers, my highschoolers, didn't check email.  They MySpace messaged their friends instead.  So I had to learn, and fast.

Using MySpace to raise name recognition and buzz is fine and great, but MySpace is best when used to do some other viral action as well. Like how Dane Cook publishes a dozen of the hundreds of pictures he gets a week with that asinine hand gesture - that's the kind of fun interaction people love to take part of on MySpace.

For that candidate I worked with, my MySpace captains and I had an action campaign to "earn respect from our parents."  We sent messages and bulletins to our MySpace friends with an 'assignment' to shame our parents about how few people vote. Give a few stats. Note the state of the world.  Time passes.  Let the guilt settle...

Later, the assignment was to click the link in the message and print-out the Voter Registration form. Give it to parents. Follow up...  

In the last 3 days, my MySpace captains got our friends to print out letters, personalize them, sign them and give them our parents urging them to consider voting for the candidate who wants to make college affordable.  The convincing factor for my MySpace friends to take action was that this was a way to get our parents to "treat us as grown-ups."

I used MiGente.com in this action to reach Latino voters - the peer-to-peer Captains were mostly those connectors and influentials who had active profiles on both MySpace and MiGente.

Candidates and orgs can do quite well at raising name recognition on MySpace just as bands do and comedians do with the standard social networking tools provided by MySpace. Getting your friends to take action is the next step: This improv comedy group in NYC just sold out a Broadway show at Caroline's Comedy Club using MySpace to increase their fan base and turn them out on election show day. We were funny.

I do a lot of thinking over here about how MySpacers behave. They are a fascinating culture, and need cultivation into progressive actions before they're Dems for life. If you know your audience, respect the conventions of the medium, and speak about the lifestyles you share - MySpace can be a goldmine.

I hope the luddite and theocratic conservatives who have gone all "Footloose" hoping to ban MySpace stay afraid of the site. I fear they will soon lose the fear. Afterall, the U.S. Marine Corps is getting in on the action.  Let's keep MySpace ours.