Belgian elections2.0 -- Bruno Tobback's MySpace trial and ERROR

Last Friday I read a message from the guys that organize the Je M'en Fous parties in Gent in my MySpace bulletin board. Instead of the new line up for their next party, they announced that Bruno Tobback launched his MySpace page today.

Before even surfing to this page, I felt kind of bad about this. First of all, I love MySpace's message board  system. Instead of getting an overload of flyers in your mailbox, you now have a place to see what's happening in your favorite club or when a new album is launched.
But a party organizer that talks politics is SPAM for me!

Especially when they use a trusted channel (my MySpace bulletin board) to send a non relevant message (I don't expect them to talk about politics, they should tell me the new line up or something related to their parties).

But this post is about Bruno Tobback... and unfortunately, I didn't feel any better when I actually visited his MySpace page.

Most social networks are build around common interests or beliefs. For MySpace this is obviously music and entertainment. Bruno Tobback's space contains three of his favorite music groups, a song of Patty Smith and a bunch of pictures of meetings and visits. The goal of this initiative is written down in "about me" section: Bruno believes in 2 way communication (nice!) and invites us for an event.

I am not saying that Bruno Tobback shouldn't have his own MySpace page, but to use this medium as a purely push communication channel is, in my humble opinion, not the optimal way. It is like participating in a community without playing by the rules. especially since there is no link between the nature of the message and the medium that is used.

I guess recent success stories of Fixkes (5923 friends)  or Debby&Nancy (5004 friends) have inspired Bruno to launch his MySpace page. And it is true that Debby en Nancy have made loads of friends through MySpace and eventually have organized a very successful off line event. But they played it by the rules of the game. They put content on their site, they made previews of songs available, they build a relation with their friends by communicating on a regular base...

Unfortunately Bruno is in good company when it comes to people/brands that have wrongly used online communities. For instance Nokia created a MySpace page for Henry Neelde, the main character in their Great Pockets campaign for the launch of their N95... Same mistake here... a MySpace page without any reason to be. And because an online community rules itselves, it is no wonder that this results in only 412 friends after several weeks. I guess Nokia had hoped for at least a tenfold...

If Bruno Tobback wants to use MySpace successfully in his election campaign, he should build upon the dynamics of the community and first of all make friends on MySpace, not just use this platform as another channel to push a message.

For the moment, I lack a reason to become Bruno's friend because he is only advertising for his Ja!Dag Instead I would like to know more about him (more content) and why he wants me to become his friend -- will he send regular updates about his campaign? Can his friends vote for a musical act on his Ja!Dag? Will he continue to update his space after the elections?

As for now I feel like MySpace is used as a traffic builder to the campaign site.. which is definitely a missed opportunity. But then... it only takes a couple of hours to make it better..and who knows, still turn it into a success?