MySpace.com is where you're most likely to go if you want to show off—to tell the world that you do, in fact, have 297 friends, and, what's more, they all think you're awesome and you guys party, like, all the time. You post all this publicly on the internet in the hopes of gaining—well, publicity, we suppose, and maybe 297 more friends to party with.
"The Obama campaign is protecting their image at my expense. I've taken a series of low blows from this campaign, and they're not getting any more support from me."
Joe Anthony (minus his head, for anonymity)
So it should come as no surprise that MySpace (and its slightly less-softcore-porn-filled cousin, Facebook) have become quite popular with those eternal publicity hounds, the 2008 presidential candidates. Many candidates have a number of fan pages, from Swedes for Obama to Rudy Giuliani is God. (The Giuliani for President of 9/11 page hasn't yet materialized.) In addition to the fan pages, most candidates have official MySpace presences, run by the campaigns, which tend to be fairly sober affairs, by MySpace standards. Hillary Clinton's MySpace page, for example, contains campaign-approved blog entries and video of the Senator's appearances, in addition to user comments like, "WATTS-UP MY NINJA!!!????" Barack Obama's official MySpace page is pretty similar, except that it was the subject of a recent controversy that hints at what could happen when social media and a major presidential campaign collide.
Joe Anthony, a 29-year-old paralegal from Los Angeles, started a Barack Obama MySpace fan page in 2004, using the obvious URL, www.myspace.com/barackobama. "I was initially inspired by Obama's keynote address at the DNC [2004 Democratic National Convention]," Anthony tells Gelf. "I admired that he was one of the few speaking out against the war from early on. I thought he was an extraordinary and inspiring speaker." The profile, Anthony says, was "initially a bit of a novelty," but as Obama continued to gain support, his MySpace page grew to the point where it had thousands of friends. Anthony started spending more time on the profile and included news articles and background information about the junior senator from Illinois. By the time Obama announced his intention to run for president, Anthony's profile had about 40,000 friends, making Obama's the largest candidate MySpace presence by far.
"Campaigns should join the online conversation. It doesn't mean they get to dominate it, though."—Micah Sifry, editor of TechPresident.comShortly thereafter, the Obama campaign contacted Anthony in the hopes of gaining a hand in the operation of the massive profile. Here is where the campaign staff began to mishandle social media, according to Micah Sifry, co-founder and executive editor of Personal Democracy Forum and TechPresident and a political science professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. "They have to either definitively take it over or definitively let it go," Sifry says. "This hybrid approach to a popular MySpace page was untenable." The hybrid approach meant that, for a time, the campaign seemed content to work with Joe Anthony. But when the profile had upwards of 160,000 friends, both sides became unhappy with the arrangement.
Here, the story diverges—Joe Rospars, Obama's new media director, stated in a blog post that Anthony submitted an unsolicited "list of itemized financial requests" after the campaign indicated its wish to obtain complete control of the profile. Anthony, however, tells Gelf that the campaign "suggested a one-time fee for transfer of the profile," and it was only in response that Anthony submitted his proposal (which amounted to $39,000, plus any fees that the campaign reportedly paid to MySpace while Anthony was still managing the page). The campaign balked, and then went around Anthony—directly to the higher ups at MySpace—to take control of his URL. (No one at the Obama campagin replied to Gelf's requests for comment.)
The network of 160,000 friends is still technically Anthony's, but if he wants to keep them, he must find a new URL for the community. Anthony currently has no interest in doing anything with the network, and says the campaign "virtually accused me of blackmail" and is "protecting their image at my expense."
"I've taken a series of low blows from this campaign, and they're not getting any more support from me," Anthony tells Gelf.
Anthony's former URL is now the campaign's official Myspace presence.
So what should the big-time presidential campaign have done? In an age where an embarrassing YouTube video can lead to a change in control of the US Senate, how does a campaign manage its message in cyberspace? Should it even try? According to Sifry, "Campaigns have to understand they no longer have perfect control of their message, if they ever did. If people on YouTube are sharing a video attacking you, you can't get YouTube to take it down, that would be silly. But you can post a response. Join the conversation. [Ed. note: In the non-Hillary Clinton sense of the phrase, we presume.] It doesn't mean you get to dominate it, though."
Sifry thinks that the Obama campaign should have let Anthony keep his URL and then started its own official one. (www.myspace.com/obamaforpresident would be a likely candidate, though it currently seems to be populated by an infamous photo from Abu Ghraib.)
"They [the Obama campaign staffers] were trying to have their cake and eat it, too," Sifry says.
Instead, Obama's camp had its Streisand moment. In their haste to control their online presence, the Obama campaign created a PR disaster that alienated a large and supportive community and detracted from Obama's fresh-faced image. Furthermore, Anthony tells Gelf that he would have welcomed many suggestions from the Obama campaign, including a lower counter-offer or the creation of a parallel official community. If he thought the campaign was treating him with respect, he claims he would have given them his URL for free. Instead, the Obama campaign caused a mini-media shit storm—generating finger-wagging articles in the Washington Post, MTV.com, and Slashdot—and has probably lost an influential supporter.
Of course, plenty of mistakes will be made as campaigns wade into this new technology. And that's fine, according to Sifry, so long as campaigns are willing to admit it. (Obama's camp has, as of yet, offered no apology to Anthony.) New media, social networking, whatever you want to call it (so long as you please avoid the term "Web 2.0"), is not only letting the world know that we ought to lay off the Jose Cuervo; it's also changing the way we select our leaders.
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