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NY Daily News 10/1/08 by Patrick Huguenin.
“President-elect Barack Obama aimed for and captured the youth vote, with exit polls reporting that approximately two-thirds of all voters under 30 answered his cry of “Yes, we can”.
Obama’s success in bringing in the “Hip Hop” vote was the work of a groundbreaking grass-roots effort to keep in touch with young voters, some of it conducted by the most seemingly simple means:text message.
So what did Barack Obama’s campaign do? They said, “If you send me your cell phone number, I'll text you who my VP pick is before I tell the media. Millions of people text in their cell phone numbers and yes, they got texts abut the VP, but they also got a bunch of texts that were like, “Have you gone to vote in your polling location yet? Do you know you can vote early in your state? Have you done so? Have you taken your buddies?
Obama has a grasp of the Internet. (early on, he hired Facebook.com co-founder Chris Hughes as part of his online support team. ...People who haven't worked on campaigns say, “Oh, he ran a good campaign”. Keli Goff said, “No, you don't understand the level of intensity and the follow-through that are how he won this. Especially with what eople like to call underrepresented voters. He engaged them in a way that no one had before.”
Keli Goff is a BET contributor and the author of “Party Crashing: How the Hip Hop Generation Declared Political Independence.”
The Obama campaign melded a big budget media assault of TV airtime and Internet social networking with a comprehensive effort to follow up with individual voters.
We have to trust our young people, with their great knowledge of Internet and cell phone communication, to help rebuild our base.
We have to fight fire with fire. Or our America is lost.

I have a little anecdotal evidence to support your thesis about how we are behind in using new technology to woo young voters. I opened a myspace account a few months back, and went to John McCain’s page to submit a friend request. It was never responded to. Recently I submitted it again and it would not allow me to do so. They ran a twentieth century campaign up against a 21st century one.