Interesting story from MySpace today where Barack Obama supporter Joe Anthony who had been running a successful MySpace site for Barack suddenly found out that his space was actually Barack’s.
The MySpace site, which Joe Anthony started 2 ½ years ago, is something that the Barack camp had been ok with. In fact according to the AP story with the Obama team, which worked with Anthony on the content and even had the password to make changes themselves.
Problems arose when the Senator’s Presidential aspirations started to gain momentum and the campaign became concerned about an outsider having control of the content so the campaign told Anthony they wanted him to turn over the MySpace site to them.
Selling domain names is a common practice, but I am not aware of someone selling a MySpace site. Joe Anthony looked at the 160,000 friends that he had gathered (about four times more than what ant over campaign has), which offer a tremendous marketing and grassroots database and priced his site at $39,000 or $0.24 a friend. Remember, this was a site that Anthony had been running for 2 ½ years.
The Obama campaign said no to the price, and instead turned to MySpace for help and they took the MySpace account away from Anthony and gave it to the Obama campaign.
Anthony referred The Associated Press to his MySpace blog, where he has written that he is heartbroken that the Obama campaign was “bullying” him out of the page he built. He said the candidate has lost his vote.
This story has a lot of long-term implications for MySpace. One is that, as a MySpace user, you do not own the MySpace URL , the way that you own a domain name. So that even if a bigger corporate site wants your URL, the precedent has been set that they can take it from you. So all those people and companies with great URL like http://www.myspace.com/smallbusinessloans who have invested time and effort developing their brand on MySpace can see that all wiped out overnight.
This is a terrible precedent from MySpace and it doesn’t say much for the Barack Obama campaign either.
Just when you think someone is flying with their social media marketing campaigns they go and do something like this. I hope this gains some major traction and Obama takes a big reputation hit for this. He deserves it after this.
I agree Cameron. For someone who is relying on grassroots support, it is not a smart move at all by Obama.
Anyone else find it a little odd that the Barack Obama campaign wouldn’t spend 40K for a Myspace page?
Granted, it sounds steep, but the campaign is awash in money – what are they spending their money on if they can’t pony up 40K for a webpage? How much do you think they paid for his campaign site?
There is now a Do The Right Thing, Barack website up in response to this issue.
I agree that the campaign should be ponying up. It doesn’t seem like a lot of money for a huge myspace presence. In fact they should have just hired the guy to continue maintaining it. However, it is Barack Obama’s “personal profile” – it is his image, for all intents and purposes, and it seems reasonable for him to want to control it, especially as the spotlight and scrutiny of a presidential campaign heats up. I think the mistake might actually have been trying to sell it to him. It sounds like the guy quickly switched from being an enthusiastic supporter volunteering his time to a hard-nosed business-man. I have no idea how the negotiation went down, but it sounds rather confrontational. I’d be pretty pissed if someone tried to sell me “my” myspace profile that they set up voluntarily – it does seem a bit like having your image held hostage. However if that person nicely made a case to me about the amount of time and energy he put into it, and asked me if i would consider compensating him for it now that i know it will be valuable, I’d have a hard time turning him down. But maybe i’m too nice. This is all speculation anyway.
I should have read this first:
http://techpresident.com/node/301
goes into much more detail about how it went down, and it sounds like the campaign team simply thought it was too much money. I wonder how much they will spend paying their team to rebuild 160,000 friends? stupid move.
A very poor move on part of the Obama camp. For $40,000 they could have made themselves look good, but now they will have to pay much more than that for damage control.
There is still time for Barack to make amends. If he doesn’t. then this will and should become a campaign issue.
Jason, you are right. $40k for a web site is nothing for a campaign that raised over $25 million in Q1
Ted, great points and thanx for the link to the techpresident story. As youy said, it would cost them a lot more than $40,000 to build up a MySpace site with 160,000 friends.
The campaign suggested he send a resume, but he would’ve had to relocate to Chicago, and he has a job already, he doesn’t have political experience, he wasn’t interested. Also, it was the campaign that asked him to come up with an amount, when he did the flat-out denied it and didn’t suggest any other amounts, but told anyone who asked that he was asking for money for the site. It wasn’t even the money that was the big issue for Joe, it was the recognition that the community had value to the campaign and that the work Joe did was of value. If every friend gave a dollar it would have paid for Joe’s request and left plenty for the campaign, I know I donated because of the site and I’m sure others have too, he’s raised much more money than he was asking for. I have added the new “official page” but I know of many who haven’t, it’s an unfortunate situation.
Astoundingly asinine. It’s hard to understand how stupid– oh wait, a campaign team is really analogous to a marketing team. One with mostly offline experience (TV, PR, etc) Ok, that explains it.