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Every day I am tracking how many friends each Presidential hopeful has on MySpace. Here is what happened:

• The Republicans woke from their slumber with a collective 30% growth spurt yesterday
• TRACKER: I found Sam Brownback’s MySpace page
• Tommy Thompson is the growth leader again with 67% growth
• McCain ranks 2nd place over all with over 40% growth
• Hillary is on the bottom rung today after losing 13 friends, but still holds 3rd place in the total friends bracket

Check out all the stats in the Presidential MySpace Race!

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I was introduced to Katchen by her husband a few weeks ago at the Google office in Boston. The Google office is quite a fun place and very bright! I’m thrilled that she has agree to come and speak to all of us at the American Marketing Association about how Google entered into east Asia and Latin America. I’ve included the details (below) and encourage you to come if you are in the area!

Google’s Entry into New Markets
Monday, April 30th, 6pm
Hult International Business School, Cambridge, MA

Growing the Business: Google’s Entry into New Markets
Presented by Katchen Gerig, Google, Inc.

Produced by the Boston Chapter of the American Marketing Association

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John Edwards has 18,645 friends on his MySpace page. Which is more total friends than all of the Republicans combined (16,610).

Barack Obama added 4,515 new friends yesterday alone, which is more than the running total of friends for several of the Republican candiddates including, Thompson, Gilmore, Paul, Tancredo, and Hunter. Romney has a total of 5,472 friends and McCain has a total of 4,491 friends, which barely stays ahead of Barack’s daily friend increase.

Are there really only 16,610 Republicans that use MySpace?

Are the candidates unaware of how to reach people through MySpace? When I helped a friend run for State Senate 10 days before the 2006 election, we managed to reach out to 54,000 local residents living in just 12 zip codes.

One could argue that some of the candidates are just not widely known or perhaps it’s too early in the race, but that argument wouldn’t work for McCain.

Some candidates are not helping themselves very well in the race either. Ron Paul has two MySpace pages. If you were to add them together, he would have almost as many friends as Hillary.

Finally, the most puzzling play by a Repulican I’ve seen to date, is Rudy Giuliani who has a “private” profile on MySpace. Maybe the Republicans just don’t get the concept of Social Media, which will be the big white elephant sitting in the room during the 2008 Presidential election; except this time, the big elephant isn’t republican… so far.

myspacepresidentialelectioncandidate

Since yesterday, Hillary Clinton, Jim Gilmore, Tommy Thompson each had more than 5% growth in adding new friends since yesterday (4/16/2006). While looking at just the number of total friends, Barack Obama is the front runner with a total 103,504 friends. However, I think it is interesting to look at the growth rates for all the candidates.

What would happen if Tommy Thompson continues a daily growth rate of 5.24% new friends per day, and IF Barack Obama continued to have a daily growth rate of 1.31% per day? If the math is correct here, Tommy would catch up and pass Barack by November 1st. I guess you never know!!

myspacepresidentialelectioncandidate

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google announced that they will offer an online presentation tool to round out their office suite which already covers their own version of Word and Excel. I would expect these services to be combined with Gmail, Google Calendar, GTalk and other services under a single brand for small business.
When asked if this will be in direct competition with Microsof, Mr. Schmidt said, “no, it does not have all the features that Office has, and it targets different scenarios. We’re really focusing on how people use the web.”

google google desktop google powerpoint google presentations

On the 1st and 2nd of January, MySpace will hold a primary before any of the official state primaries when every user will be asked to vote for their favorite candidate. I’ve decided to watch the number of MySpace friends that each candidate has leading up to the MySpace primary. OnApril 3rd, when the digital primary was announced, I logged the number of friends for the top 4. As it stands today, most of the candidates already have MySpace pages and the numbers of friends for their campaigns are multiplying.

• Barack Obama 4/3 89,465 friends 4/16 102,165 friends
  
• John Edwards 4/3 16,921 friends 4/16 18,332 friends
  
• Hillary Clinton 4/3 7,468 friends 4/16 10,182 friends
  
• Mitt Romney 4/16 5,277 friends
• John McCain 4/3 3,596 friends 4/16 4,368 friends
• Ron Paul 4/16 3,528 friends (Congressman page: 5,687 friends)
• Bill Richardson 4/16 2,586 friends
• Dennis Kucinich 4/16 2,179 friends
• Joe Biden 4/16 1,618 friends
• Tom Vilsack 4/16 1,294 friends
• Tom Tancredo 4/16 1,138 friends
• Duncan Hunter 4/16 1,100 friends
• Chris Dodd 4/16 702 friends
• Jim Gilmore 4/16 435 friends
• Tommy Thompson 4/16 247 friends
• Rudy Guiliani (hidden profile)
• Sam Brownback (no official myspace page)

myspacepresidentialelectioncandidate