May 2nd, 2007
Obama campaign in cyberspat over supporter's MySpace page
In the latest development in the MySpace wars, Mr. Clean, Barack Obama, has been a litle dirtied over his campaign's handling of a pro-Obama blogger looking for a little support. TechPresident reportson what happened when an Obama devotee's MySpace page soared beyond his wildest dreams and sadly spun out of his control.
In 2004, Joe Anthony, a paralegal living in Los Angeles, had the dubious luck to have the URL, myspace.com/barackobama. Anthony devotedly worked on the fan page for the newly elected senator. After Obama announced his candidacy for president, the site quickly grew to over 160,000 friends.
Needless to say, it caught the attention of campaign's Internet staff and at first things seemed copacetic. But it wasn't long before things began to go awry. After MySpace announced the creation of the political "Impact Channel," and pointed to Anthony's Obama profile, friends were pouring in at about 80,000, making a huge workload for Anthony.
It wasn't long before Anthony emailed the Obama campaign asking to be paid in some way for his time. His request was met with a more traditional campaign approach–they needed to control the page.
"For the past few weeks, the campaign decided it would be better if they just took control of the profile and we decided to try to come to some agreement," said Anthony. "By this time, I didn't have quite as much respect for the campaign guys, and frankly felt like I was just being used. They knew about this profile the entire time, and really just waited until it got enough media coverage and friends request so they could step in and bully me out of it."
The Obama staffer asked Anthony to propose a one-time consulting fee. In exchange he would give them control of the page, with credit for the work he had put into it.
"I considered the time I had put into it from January 1st of this year, not counting the previous two years. It was about $39,000. Plus I asked that if any fees were to be paid to MySpace by the campaign up to that point in time, those should be shared with me, up to $10,000. There was no counter-offer. They said they didn't have any money."
As the feud currently stands, Obama's staffers have gained control over the site by getting MySpace to lock down his access to it. They claim that Anthony was violating MySpace's terms of service by falsely representing himself as Obama, and thus they didn't have to pay him anything.
The URL has been taken away from Joe Anthony and turned over to the Obama campaign.
"There is an incredible amount of support for Obama's candidacy on MySpace and our goal is to ensure that we are being as responsive as possible to the community," Jen Psaki, the deputy press director for Obama. "Because MySpace and the community treated the work as official and due to sheer volume, our campaign staff wanted make sure users had direct access to the campaign. We support the MySpace communty, and look forward to building our relationship."
All in all a pretty slimy way to treat a supporter who had delivered much more energy and traffic than the campaign would have mustered themselves. And the campaign isn't exactly covering itself in glory with its current media spin. Reports TechPresident:
Speaking on background, Obama campaign staffers are spreading word that Anthony just wanted a "big payday." Anthony in turn has posted a missive on his blog (that was originally sent to me as an email) accusing the Obama team of "bullying…[and] rotten and dishonest" behavior. However one parses those accusations (more below), the Obama campaign's reputation as the most net-savvy of 2008 has taken a big hit.
