Obama’s MySpace Fiasco
Micah Sifry has a fantastic story up on the battle currently being waged over Barack Obama’s MySpace profile. In a nutshell, a few years ago an Obama fanatic reserved Obama’s name on MySpace and began building a network on Obama’s behalf. The campaign worked with the supporter for a while, got fed up and went to MySpace and forced the supporter to give up the profile. Micah has all the bloody details.
At the end of the article Micah asks this question:
Is it true that once a voter-generated site gets major traction, the campaign affected has to control it? Can a front-running presidential campaign–even one as devoted to empowering supporters to take their own initiatives and connect to each other through social network tools as the Obama campaign–afford a major site run by a campaign volunteer outside their control? Is such control even possible?
In a post on Prezvid, Jeff Jarvis seems to imply that campaigns should let supporters own the candidate spaces on these social networks:
The moral of the story is that politics is still all about control. There is no playbook for handing over control to the people, only for acting like it. Every attempt to use social networking on the internet for campaigns is just that — an attempt to use.
To me this is a really simple issue. The Obama campaign has to have ultimate control over www.myspace.com/barackobama. Period.
Having ventured into the MySpace wilderness looking for candidate profiles, it is almost impossible to tell the real profiles from the fakes ones. Users can be easily mislead into friending the wrong person. By owning the most common profile name and maintaining an official presence, the campaign provides clarity to users, most of whom are looking for the endorsed version of the profile. I’m all for supporters creating their own groups and conducting their own activities, I just see value in having an official presence in addition to the voter-generated ones.
I also don’t think it is unreasonable for a campaign to want to exercise control over what pictures and blog entries are posted and what friend requests they accept. Every other user of MySpace has that control, why shouldn’t Barack Obama?
If that makes me top down, I guess I’m top down.
Regarding the rest of story, I agree that the Obama campaign mishandled this in every way imaginable. As Jerome Armstrong says, hire the kid that built up the profile. Buy the profile. Negotiate. Do something. Pushing the supporter aside and starting over just seems like an unfathomably dumb thing to do to me.
Team Building Videos: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
When I was in traditional PR one of the activities I always thought was a waste of time and money was the creation of internal, morale boosting videos. Basically, the idea is to make this “cool” video to get everyone fired up at some big event, nevermind the other 364 days in the year. It almost impossible to make one of these that doesn’t make people cringe.
Thanks to YouTube, these types of videos are showing up on the Internet. Below are three that represent the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of the team building video genre.
The Good
This internal Kodak video is brilliant. It beautifully describes the company’s transition to digital. I got a little fired up watching it.
Continue reading “Team Building Videos: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly” »
Capitol Hill’s Constituent E-mail Culture and Future
I was on Capitol Hill Monday morning attending the "Ready-Made Constituent Relationships: A Look at How Technology Empowers and Enables Effective Constituent Relationship Management" presentation hosted by George Washington University's Institute for Politics & The Internet (IPDI).
While the presentation covered a broad range of constituent services, the main focus was e-mail, which is a more efficient medium of communication than snail mail. The panelists emphasized that a constituent that sends an e-mail uses virtually immediate communication, but most of the time a staff will respond weeks later, if at all, using a regular letter. Why can't a constituent get a reply much sooner? One of the answers is interesting. There is a strong aversion to responding to constituent e-mail with e-mail from Capitol Hill. Continue reading “Capitol Hill’s Constituent E-mail Culture and Future” »
Bobby Jindal for Governor Goes Live
Working with our partners at iWeb Strategies and episode49, we launched a new website for Bobby Jindal (R-LA) for Governor yesterday (blog here). Along with the website, the Jindal campaign also launched profiles on MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. Brian Lyle has the details over on the iWeb Strategies blog.
Update:
- Blaise Hazelwood posts her thoughts over on iWeb Strategies blog
- Brad Levinson from The Beta Stage has some nice things to say about the site and Bobby Jindal’s blog efforts