I haven’t seen the show myself, but apparently CBS’s “How I Met Your Mother” managed to use MySpace to noticably bump their ratings recently, by a million viewers. From today’s Cynopsis:

An elaborate fan page for a character the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother planted on MySpace by its producers helped drive the show to its highest ratings of the season among 18-34 year olds, according to The New York Times. Robin Sparkles is the backstory identity of aspiring news anchor Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders), who played in a synth-pop band The Sparkles in high school, a revelation another character in the show made when he discovered a streaming video of a Sparkles performance online. The Robin Sparkles MySpace page, which even included a made-up hit single “Let’s Go to the Mall,” attracted 5,000 “friends” in a single day following the on-air tie in and ratings of the show the next week jumped by more than 1 million viewers. Last night’s episode drove viewers back to MySpace and cbs.com for the reenactment of a bachelor party.

Pretty clever and hopefully something other networks will take notice of without running it into the ground.

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