Joe Anthony, former owner of Barack Obama’s unofficial Myspace page, is a disgruntled online campaign volunteer. Get used to them. In our age of decentralized political campaigns (thanks to the web) controlling and satisfying every facet of a campaign from meetups to Myspaces is simply impossible.
In the now widely reported incident Obama’s campaign staff closed down Joe’s unofficial Obama Myspace page. It appears Obama’s friend count was exploding too quickly (over 160,000 friends). And the campaign worried that Joe (as an unpaid volunteer) would not be able to handle the demands of a Presidential Myspace page.
Of course this is something they should have calculated. Especially a campaign as web savvy as Obama’s. The coordinator of online organizing for the Obama campaign is 23 year old Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook.
It appears even social networking credentials like co-founding Facebook could not make up for his rather obvious inexperience.
Which helps explain why the Obama campaign could allow such a public gaffe to occur in the first place. If you’re a campaign coordinator, it’s unfortunate but true that all the press training in the world won’t help your legions of volunteers. There’s simply too many outlets and too much anonymity on the web to try old-fashioned control tactics.
And future campaign coordinators better take this as a cautionary tale. In a net-roots campaign effort, as any ground roots effort, you can not own every channel of communication. So don’t seek it. You’re much better off trying to shape a message that your volunteers actually understand. Crazy, I know. At least this way they can represent that message accurately themselves– through all the local TV interviews and Facebook groups they want. And you’ll never have to worry about censuring them.
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Cathleen Kline
November 12th, 2008