Obama's MySpace Storylet

Obama Campaign Asks: Is It MySpace or Yours?
Thursday, May 3, 2007; Page A04
The Washington Post

In the first MySpace skirmish of the 2008 presidential race, no one's come out looking good. Not MySpace, the popular social networking site. Not Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who until earlier this week had more "friends" on the site -- about 160,000 -- than almost all the other candidates combined. Not Joe Anthony, the 29-year-old paralegal who created a MySpace fan page that carried Obama's name.

In November 2004, after hearing Obama's keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention, Anthony began adding friends to his Obama page. By the time Obama announced his candidacy earlier this year, he had about 30,000 friends. When MySpace started its Impact Channel as the central hub of its candidate profiles two months ago, Obama's camp used Anthony's page as its official MySpace page. For weeks, Anthony worked with Obama's online team as the senator continued to attract more friends.

Read the full Washington Post story here

Only the participants know for sure, but it seems this could have been worked out before it became a storylet with 368 news stories linking from Google News.

Whoever is at fault, the Obama Team should have formalized their deal earlier on with Mr. Anthony. They could have employed him or negotiated a buyout to compensate him for his work. Although MySpace isn’t exactly a traditional direct mail mailing list there was the potential of 160,000 “good names” there. That’s tough to rebuild.

However I do have a problem with Mr. Anthony building the MySpace page as a voluntary effort and then asking to be compensated to show “he wouldn’t be bullied.” And if 130,000 “friends” signed on after Senator Obama announced, how much did Mr. Anthony contribute?

“We wanted to work with Joe. But at the end of the day, this page is bigger than him," said campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki.

I cringed a little at that one. No, the page is not bigger than the volunteer even if he is being uncooperative. Work it out, avoid the story, keep the 160,000 contacts.

Of course, the name belongs to and should be the property of the candidate. I just can’t help but think they could have gotten to a resolution a little more elegantly.

PS If the primary were held today, Sen. Obama would most likely have my vote.