WASHINGTON (AP) -- Is MySpace always mine or can it belong to someone else?
At the cost of losing 160,000 friends, Democrat Barack Obama's presidential campaign has taken over control of the MySpace page listed under his name on the popular social networking site.
For the past two and a half years, the page has been run by an Obama supporter from Los Angeles named Joe Anthony. At first, that arrangement was fine with the Obama team, which worked with Anthony on the content and even had the password to make changes themselves.
But as the site exploded in popularity in recent months, the campaign became concerned about an outsider having control of the content and responses going out under Obama's name and told Anthony they wanted him to turn it over.
In this new frontier of online campaigning, it's hard to determine the value of 160,000 MySpace friends -- about four times what any other official campaign MySpace page has amassed. But the Obama campaign decided they wouldn't pay $39,000, which is what Anthony said he proposed for his extensive work on the site, plus some additional fees up to $10,000.
MySpace reluctantly stepped in to settle the dispute and decided that Obama should have the rights to control his page as of Monday night, while Anthony had the right to take the contact information for all the friends who signed up while he was in control. That includes the right to tell them exactly how he feels about the Obama campaign.
Anthony referred The Associated Press to his MySpace blog, where he has written that he is heartbroken that the Obama campaign was "bullying" him out of the page he built. He said the candidate has lost his vote.
This brings up an interesting question here--how much is 160,000 friends worth to a presidential campaign? Here is a guy, Joe Anthony, who has worked on his own time in creating a Barack Obama MySpace website. This MySpace site has generated enough buzz to where you have 160,000 Obama supporters, and potential Obama campaign contributers. That is a pretty strong site here that is working on behalf of the Obama campaign. What is even more crazy here, is that the Obama campaign knew of this site, worked with Anthony in providing content, and even had the password to make changes to the site itself. As the site grew in power and influence, the Obama campaign decided they couldn't let Anthony control this site, and possibly use it against Barack Obama. The Obama campaign decided they wouldn't pay Anthony the $49,000 he was offering. Instead, this dispute went through MySpace, which gave the Obama campaign the site, but allowed Anthony to take control of all the contact information that the site gathered when he controlled it. What we have is almost like a contract dispute between the Obama campaign, and an Obama supporter--even though there is no contract involved between the two.
Now I want to look at this dispute from a different perspective. Anthony was offering $49,000 for the entire site, which includes the 160,000 contacts. If you divide the $49,000 fee with the 160,000 contacts, the Obama campaign would have been paying $.31 for each contact. For the Obama campaign to recoup their costs here, the campaign would need either 490 supporters out of the 160,000 to contribute a $100 donation each to the campaign, or even 1,960 supporters out of the 160,000 to contribute $25.00 each to the campaign. It would even take 9,800 supporters to contribute $5.00 to the campaign in order to recoup the $49,000 cost for the MySpace site and the contact list. What is more, this is a contact list of Obama supporters--these are voters who have decided to vote for Barack Obama in the Democratic primaries. Not only could these individuals be more willing to provide political campaign contributions to Obama, but they also may be willing to volunteer their own time for the Obama campaign. This brings up the question of how many of these 160,000 individuals are willing to volunteer their time, how much time are they willing to volunteer, and what is the potential benefits the Obama campaign receives for this time, or even the opportunity costs of having these volunteers contribute their time to something else. I'm not sure if the Obama campaign seriously considered these possibilities before they demanded control of Anthony's MySpace page. Looking at this small article, it seems that the only thing the Obama campaign was concerned about was the potential political damage that Anthony could cause against Obama within the MySpace page. And the Obama campaign over-reacted to limit a potential political damage by taking control of the MySpace page.
But there is also another issue here with Anthony himself. Anthony decided on his own time to create a successful political web page to support Barack Obama. He is a supporter, and not a paid member of the Obama campaign staff. His MySpace page is no different than the 28,000 other MySpace web pages that can be found under the name "Barack Obama." Hillary Clinton has 19,800 MySpace web pages. John Edwards has 21,000 MySpace web pages. There are two important distinctions to remember here--first, is that Anthony was able to create a successful MySpace page for the Obama campaign. The second distinction is that the Obama campaign was given access to Anthony's page in providing content to the page, and that Anthony provided the Obama campaign the MySpace password to allow the Obama campaign to adapt the page for their own use. In a sense, Anthony gave control of his page to the Obama campaign without allowing some type of legal contract to be drawn up between the two parties involved, or allowing penalties if one of the parties decided to withdrawal from the contract. The Obama campaign wanted to control of the MySpace site so that Anthony could not send information out that would harm Obama. It is the reason we have this dispute between Anthony and the Obama campaign, and the reason MySpace decided to give control of the site to the Obama campaign, but the contact names to Anthony. It brings us back, full circle, to the original question of how much is a contact worth to a presidential campaign. As more people start creating their own web pages, or MySpace pages, in support of their own candidates, some of these pages are going to become successful tools to the campaign staffs of these candidates. We're going to have to start thinking up new rules and business contracts that can be drafted between the campaign staffs and the supporters creating these successful sites so that both parties can benefit from each other.
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