If you're a female Las Vegas resident, age 21 to 30, Tao wants to be your friend -- your MySpace friend. The trendy Las Vegas club is one of a dozen using the free Internet community to target potential customers like a high-school geek targets potential girlfriends.
"It's a really interesting way to communicate with a very targeted group of people," says Jason Strauss, Tao Las Vegas' owner and operating partner. Strauss says that MySpace generates an average of 200 requests to be added to his VIP list every night.
"But where the value really comes is when we have a last-minute event or guest DJ we're trying to promote," he says. "We get a response from it immediately, because people are on MySpace all the time."
MySpace, the most popular U.S. Web site and a cultural juggernaut claiming more than 100 million members, is the social hub for most Americans younger than 25. That's why Pure, Jet, Club Rio, Tryst, ghostbar, Body English, Tangerine, Tabu, Studio 54, Drai's and VooDoo Lounge all maintain MySpace profiles similar to Tao's.
These clubs join thousands of businesses nationwide -- including clothing companies, movie studios, and radio and TV stations -- using MySpace to directly target the youth market.
"When I was told about it two-and-a-half years ago, I figured it was just a sneaky way to create yet another online dating service," says Body English promotions director Jack Lafleur. "Clearly, I was wrong. We use MySpace for both Rehab and Body English and we're able to get the word out to over 12,000 people of any special events we may have going on."
From MySpace's point of view, the sneaky activity going on is being conducted by these businesses.
"The point of MySpace is to grow a community in an organic way," a MySpace spokeswoman says. "Anything that takes away from that community, instead of adding to it, is a problem we're trying to address."
MySpace -- founded in 2003 by a team of Los Angeles-based programmers and purchased last year for $580 million by media mogul Rupert Murdoch -- is a marketer's dream because its database can be searched according to age, gender and location.
"I (search for) an age range of 21 to 35, and a 50-mile range from the club I'm promoting," says Las Vegas promoter Linsie McNamee, whose current MySpace page advertises the list she oversees at the dance club Ice. "Then I'll skim each page to make sure it's someone who might be interested."
MySpace even publicly lists the birthdays it requires members to provide.
"We like to invite people in during the week of their birthday for a few drinks on us," says Lafleur, who admits that the majority of his invitees are barely adult females.
"It's like moths to a flame," says Lafleur, "moths being the guys and girls being the flame. We want as much fire as possible."
Similarly, Strauss allows: "We're obviously not looking for a 55-year-old married couple from Summerlin that has no desire to go to a club on the Strip."
Since MySpace is designed for social interaction, businesses must create a profile by picking a gender and age. (Most Las Vegas clubs choose a female, age 21 or 22.) These "people" attempt to get potential customers to add them as "friends." (On MySpace, only your friends can receive your mass announcements and invitations.)
If you received a friend request from the MySpace member "Tao Las Vegas" recently, it was illustrated with a photo of Ryan Wahrenbrock, a Best Agency model whose comely blond image would have popped up in your "friend request" box. (Wahrenbrock, 27, works as one of the club's "bathtub girls," who splash around in several tubs lining the venue.)
Not only did the request not come from Wahrenbrock, however, it may not have come from a real person. A time-consuming series of mouse clicks is required to convert each search result into a friend request. So software applications called "friend bots" have emerged to automate and expedite the process.
"The bots will send a friend request to 500 people in a manner of 30 minutes, whereas it would take days to do it manually," says Las Vegas event promoter Mark Wiley. (MySpace has imposed a cap of 500 friend requests per day.)
These programs -- with names such as FriendBot Adder, Friend Fetch and MyFriendBot -- cost $20-$300 to download. And they e-mail "personal" notes to all targets who approve the friend request, thanking them for the addition.
Lafleur claims Body English doesn't use friend bots. Strauss, however, admits that Tao's 27,844 friends were accumulated with the use of "special programs" that are "obviously a trade secret."
MySpace is reportedly trying to thwart bot programs via security measures and cease-and-desist letters to their distributors. While the spokeswoman for the Santa Monica, Calif.-based company declined to comment directly on the problem, she did express concern about the exploitation of what is intended to be a social and creative community for purely commercial purposes.
