I must say -- the "free" part is a big one.  Other marketing is so expensive!

MySpace is funny because you can spend as much or as little time on it as you want.  Since I'm new at it, I haven't figured out how to ration my time, and I've found that it's an incredible time sink.  It's really fun and rewarding to tell someone about Jack Carter when they ordinarily wouldn't have heard about him.

Sarah

Thanks!  These are great suggestions!  I'll work on it.  We have an orange, Red Rock Canyon-inspired color scheme on the website -- we'll use it for the profile, too.

And the "favorites" will be easy to add.

Sarah

Suggestions:

Lucas is right on the money--ADD more photos on a regular schedule, and more importantly, change the default picture to a new image every week or so.  The best thing to do on Myspace if you want a lot of page views is to set up a page that seems living, dynamic, and fluid.  The page you have right now looks a little static due to the default background.  Customizing it will go a long way.  You can do a quick google search for tips on how to customize Myspace pages.

Another thing--video.  If you have a youth-oriented Youtube clip, by all means, embed that stuff on the profile.  Feel free to even include another photo in the "About Me" section.  It really helps.

Also, people really like it if you leave a comment on their page when they add you as friends.  But, since Jack isn't actually running his own page, I'd understand if you were hesitant to do taht.

Great idea. It was interesting watching the myspace battle in the California Gubernatorial primary.

One thing we kept on the DL about the Hackett campaign is that we had a couple of people spending all day and late into the night reaching out over myspace to local youth during the final push. The feedback was astonishing, people seemed as interested to talk as they are when you knock on their door. Peer-to-peer is such a stronger model than top down, I'm glad to see you taking advantage of this.

Right now, I think Russ Feingold has the most friends (4,129) of any Democrat followed by Phil Angelides (1692).

Of Senate Candidates, mydd'er Pete Ashdown has 430 friends and Ned Lamont has 50 (get on it Tim!).

Anyone I'm missing?

And Deval Patrick comes in at 54.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.  "Thanks For the Add!" is the most obnoxious phrase ever.  You can say essentially the same thing in a different amount of words, and it's fine.

That was really funny.  But word to the wise: no one can be "an Emo".

Emo is a style.  But I thought it was hysterical when you compared Lieberman to a teenaged girl.  I'm impressed that someone your age could write like that!  ;P

The biggest race where this could be a factor is PA-08, where the freshman Republican Congressman is trying to SHUT DOWN access to MySpace in libraries and schools, and his opponent is 32 year-old Iraq War vet Patrick Murphy.  The Murphy campaign NEEDS a MySpace profile, um, yesterday, to define his opponent's plan and get that community to vote en masse for him.  Texting is another opportunity.

Yeah it seems like every month I read rumors of a new sequel with or without him.  He still sticks by his promise not to film a movie while in office.

Facebook is similar social network software for college students.  Ask most college students about it and they will tell you that they log on almost every day.

Make sure you have your interns set up Carter facebook groups at their schools.

Carter events near campus can be publicized with the event feature.

You can search for liberals, people from a certain town, people interested in politics, etc...  It's the ultimate in targeting.

Facebook advertising is incredibly cheap -- 3000 people for $5!

Hey Sarah.. Keep up the great work.  I hope this race gets more attention from the netroots.  I sent just sent Jack a contribution this morning.  Just a thought... I wouldnt use the term "viral" to describe outreach.  It has bad feel to it, and can be a exploited liability.  

How do you keep track of identified supporters? Lets say lots of people who are actually registered voters in our state were to visit the site, and even express support, is there any way to track their support and mobilize them to vote?

The classic problem of any political campaign is that the campaign has lots of people say "I like you and want you to win." Being able to get those people to actually vote is another thing entirely.

I remain skeptical and while I think its great you're doing it, I do think that it creates a false perception that this is reaching out to people who wouldn't already be voting.

As you have probalby learned by now, Democratic areas in NV tend to max out at about 70% turnout and the ones that are the most vote-rich are not the ones on MySpace -- they are blue collar white and Latino precincts.

Keep it up but lets not confuse this with actual party-building on the ground.

I'll look at adding Jack as a friend.

I know that I've found a myspace page for John Laesch's campaign.  Maybe someone should put together a list of all the candidates who are on myspace.  I would, if only I had the time.

Here are some links to get you started

Ned Lamon: http://myspace.com/nedlamont
Bob Shamansky (OH-12) http://www.myspace.com/shamansky
at 79 he may be the oldest MySpacer
Phil Angelides: http://myspace.com/angelides

Honestly, I have more politicians than real world friends on myspace.  I have spent more time thinking of it as a political tool rather than for "fun".

Florida gubernatorial candidate Rod Smith has a myspace profile. Check it out:

http://www.myspace.com/rodsmithforgovern or

This then leads to another part of the question.  To what extent does IDing voters, or even turning out voters need to be a top down effort?  In other words, is it possible to  use some sort of mesh network, instead of a hierarchical network to identify and turn out voters.

I think this discussion is one of the most important discussions in Democratic politics. Let's say I am a low propensity young voter and my friend from high school tells me I should support the most excellent candidate ever. On election day, am I more likely to vote because I was tossed into that candidate's GOTV universe (and hassled with a bunch of robo-calls) or because my buddy sent me an email?

For a growing segment of the population, peer-to-peer is not just the most effective means of persuasion, but the most effective means of GOTV.

Think of the old adage that you only reply to a negative hit in the same medium in which it is delivered. Why not turn that on it's head and for a new adage that you turn out votes via the method you gained each voter's support?

GOTV doesn't need to be just top-down, it should be focused on the most effective method to get supporters to the polls.

While it goes against traditional wisdom, I would suggest that candidates should keep peer-to-peer supporters out of the traditional GOTV universe and focus on turning them out via the person who turned them on. This isn't that crazy of an idea, I've worked on campaigns that have let the unions turn out the union vote, why not let myspace influence leaders turn out their vote?

'm managing a state senate campaign in Rhode Island and we've already got two Facebook groups (and we're working on getting more) and we've just put up a MySpace group (www.myspace.com/patrickin2006).  Our familiarity with MySpace puts us in pretty much the same boat as Sarah, but the bottom line is that it's still really exciting to see that we can get other young people involved.  

One suggestion that I have is having college volunteers set up faux facebook profiles of your dad, which some politicians have already started doing.  That way, as on MySpace, you can put up more personal information and make it easier for the college kids to relate to him.  

No, I don't mean to try and mislead people, I think that, as long as you're clear about who the actual person behind the group is, it can work.  The "elect this candidate" groups are great, but if you have a really committed volunteer at some school who's clear that they're the person behind the profile, you can include information that wouldn't make sense in one of the groups (such as favorite books).  It's also a very different way of seeing information about a candidate (largely like having a MySpace profile).  It's not a strategy for garnering a large number of votes, but it's one small part of having people remember who you are or something about you.

We're working on a David Hahn for Governor MySpace page in Nebraska.  Here's one of my concerns: do you screen out what look to be sexspammer profiles?  How do you manage the comments?

Email sent to Murphy's blog person about this idea.