Micah Sifry had this great scoop yesterday about a hard-working paralegal named Joe Anthony, a big Barack Obama supporter who has seemingly been given the shaft by the Democratic presidential contender’s campaign staff.
Anthony became a big Obama fan back in 2004 shortly after he got elected to the Senate from Illinois. Anthony was so excited about Obama’s prospects that he started an unofficial fan page for the rising star on MySpace which had the URL of “myspace.com/barackobama.”
Backed by Anthony’s care and work, and the inclusion of the page in MySpace’s recently launched Impact Channel, the profile of Obama grew to the point that it had over 160,000 friends. But the workload of maintaining the page combined with a request from Obama’s people that Anthony turn over the page to them, prompted the self-described passionate volunteer to ask for compensation. He asked for a one-time payment of $39,000. (Here’s Anthony’s explanation of what happened.)
Obama’s team, which includes Internet staffer Chris Hughes, one of the co-founders of Facebook, simply appropriated the URL — as was their right given the use of Obama’s name — rather than pay Anthony. As a consequence, the number of Obama’s MySpace friends immediately plummeted to 12,000 and nobody is happy.
Worse, the press is picking up on this and the presidential contender is looking a little…stingy and ungrateful and not very smart. Meanwhile, Micah Sifry, a big fan of bottom-up politics, surveyed an A-list group of seasoned campaign consultants to find out how much a candidate might expect to pay for the creation of such a MySpace “mega-group.”
They all say Obama might have had to shell out a lot of dough for the kind of site that Anthony created — anywhere from $60,000 to over $3.2 million, although this latter figure assumes the list of friends would be good campaign contributors (not a very good assumption).
Micah’s conclusion:
What Anthony did was worth a lot. Clearly the Obama campaign thought what he had built was very valuable too, so valuable that they had to control it. Too bad they weren’t smart enough to pay for it.
You can say that again. By refusing to pay Anthony, the Obama campaign lost 148,000 MySpace friends, is suffering from bad press and has dinged the candidate’s image permanently among MySpace denizens. I bet right now they’d pay twice what Anthony originally requested to erase all that.
Cynthia Brumfield at 4:53 PM|Comments(0)
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