Thou Shalt: 10 Musts for MySpace Advocacy-Building

5) Make sure you’re ready before going “live.” You want to wow potential friends from the start. Be sure to test your layout on a dummy account to make sure the coding is correct. Do you like the picture and title of your profile? Does everything display as you’d like it to?

6) Create edgy, viral content. MySpace is a great place to test out ideas to see what things interest people and get passed around. “If it doesn’t make you think ‘Cool!’ then it’s probably not viral,” Ruben writes. Post videos and music, if you have them. See what works better: a campaign-specific page or a general organizational page. If you have a campaign based around a personality, e.g., a candidate for a political organization, or an animal for an animal-welfare group, you can set up a fake profile for them.

7) Contact your current supporters who have MySpace accounts. Survey your members to find out who they are. You can upload your personal address book and send contacts a “friend request.” MySpace will let you upload up to 90 e-mail addresses from your personal address book at a time.

8) Keep up communications with MySpace friends. Update your profile regularly to reflect new issues you’re working on. You also can encourage friends and constituents to subscribe to your MySpace blog to stay current with new postings.

9) Devote staff time to MySpace advocacy. Once created, don’t leave your page — and friends — hanging. Ruben recommends assigning a staff person to accept friend requests, post comments on other people’s pages and invite new users to become friends.

10) Funnel friends to your organizational Web site to build your e-mail list. Create prominent links on your profile page to make it easy for people who visit your profile to join your e-mail list, and track who joins your list through your MySpace profile. Tailor your messaging in subsequent communications with them in a way that acknowledges that this is how they joined your constituency.