Skip to content
News

Marines’ New Recruiting Tool: MySpace

Anyone can post a profile to MySpace, and the U.S. Marine Corps have taken advantage of the Internet’s largest social networking website to gain cyber-access to a large pool of America’s youth. Visiting the Marines’ MySpace page lets MySpace users watch promotional streaming videos and contact Marines recruiters. As of press time, the Marines have over 12,000 friends, and of them, according to the Associated Press, 170 have been named as legitimate prospective recruits. Other branches of the military are expected to make MySpace profiles in the near future for recruiting purposes.

Here’s what the online community is saying:

“I don’t believe this would bother me so much if we weren’t currently at war. But we are, and soldiers have a real chance of dying, getting catastrophically injured, or coming home physically safe but seriously fucked up — and the recruiters don’t really use those possibilities as a selling point, if you know what I mean — so, at the moment, this does bother me, especially as recruiting tactics have been getting increasingly predatory (and unethical).” — alternet.org

“While I can’t imagine this will be terribly effective, the U.S. military would be remiss if it didn’t try to take advantage of MySpace to recruit given its current manpower shortage. Given how little this would cost the U.S. government per recruit, I can’t find much wrong with this move at all.” — Grant Woodward , techdirt.com

“I suspect MySpace is cheaper per lead than having recruiters walk the malls and drive the community looking for stragglers. I also suspect that the raw number of leads generated from MySpace will not be significant…until Murdoch makes membership in MySpace dependent on becoming friends with the Marines.” — CK, stevegilliard.blogspot.com

“It doesn’t sound any more creepy than the idea of any cheesy recruiting drive. It’s interesting to see them change tactics though. Maybe they’ll get spammed by anti-war protesters with fake requests. Denial of Service military recruiting anyone?” — Jose, stevegilliard.blogspot.com

Talk: Should the Marine Corps be allowed to recruit on MySpace? COMMENT

On the Web: myspace.com/themarinecorps