Illinois Senator and Presidential hopeful Barack Obama has 159,999 more friends tonight.
The one he lost--which would have made an even 160,000--was Joe Anthony of Los Angeles, California. Anthony ran a MySpace profile for Barack Obama for approximately 2 1/2 years. The Obama campaign even helped Anthony with content changes.
Until today...when they took the site over against Anthony's wishes and without his permission.
From FoxNews:
But as the site exploded in popularity in recent months, the campaign became concerned about an outsider controlling the content and responses going out under Obama's name. It told Anthony it 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 had 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 http://www.myspace.com/barackobama as of Monday night. Anthony had the right to take all the friends who signed up while he was in control, and that includes the right to tell them how he feels about the Obama campaign --although he said he was still locked out of the page with his contacts as of Wednesday.
Now, Obama has lost the vote of Joe Anthony---and he's telling his story. If you read his narrative, what started as a labor of love for him is now a situation that has left him "heart-broken."
If the Internet is the future of grass-roots campaigning, I can only hope that other campaigns learn from the missteps of Obama's people. This was the support of 160,000 people and they didn't have to do anything other than let the site exist. Now, the site has a mere 20,000 friends and it makes me wonder if this "hostile takeover" was really worth it?
If this is the way an Obama Campaign treats supporters, what will an Obama Adminstration do?
William Smith
ConservativeBlogger.com
