Numbers tell a story

John McCain:

• 53,381 MySpace friends
• 136,793 Facebook friends

Barack OBama

• 386,341 MySpace friends
• 894,666 Facebook friends

Aside from the obvious, Obama's supporters are younger, have more time on their hands, and have been involved in a heated primary for 6 months, the numbers say something else to me.

Both candidates have more friends on Facebook than MySpace by a little less than 3:1. But MySpace total US traffic more than doubles Facebook. If they are both similar "social networks" the numbers would be opposite. If they had the same level of activity, that would favor Facebook a lot but this is pretty crazy.

People are just a ton more likely to share political views on Facebook, what else are they more likely to share? Alot would be my guess. Think marketers should care about that?

MySpace.com - Pam/Jenna - 28 - Female - Scranton, US - www.myspace.com/pambeesley

MySpace.com - Pam/Jenna - 28 - Female - Scranton, US - www.myspace.com/pambeesley

The actress who plays Pam on the Office has a MySpace page with over 100k friends. Advertisers spend literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to create pages, with contests, polls, wallpapers, games, and god knows what else in order to get that get a fraction of that engagement.

This doesn't cost anything but talent's time. Maybe there's a better way of skinning the viral marketing cat.