techPresident - Alan Rosenblatt - Comments

Valuing Anthony's Work, and Paying for it

threevalued — Mon, 07 May 2007 13:33:56 -0400

It seems to me that the only reasonable way to put a value on Anthony's work is to compare it with what it would have cost the campaign to do the work itself. This in turn involves two alternatives: had they controlled just the URL from the time of announcement, or the URL plus friends at the time. My guess is that on either alternative, the outcome (measured in friends, which seems to be the basis for ancillary effects such as good press, potential volunteers, etc.) would be of the same order of magnitude, somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000.

So what would it have cost the campaign to do this? Perhaps Anthony would have asked for monetary compensation for the URL, which would indeed be a form of cybersquatting, and clearly against MySpace TOS policy, or for the friends list, which is a grayer area, but if my speculation is correct, they could have passed on this. So we should count startup costs at 0. Then they would need someone to do the work Anthony did. Now Chris Hughes (infamous in the Anthony-was-screwed camp, I guess) does this sort of thing part time for MyBarackObama; according to the FEC, he was paid 3,000 for the first quarter. Blue State Digital was paid 36,000 for all the work they did on the web site. David Plouffe, the chair of the campaign, was paid 10,000. The highest paid individual I could find was paid 27,000.

If this is right, the savings to the campaign in salary was probably less than 10,000, perhaps much less. So should they have made a counteroffer?

One might say that in view of all the negative publicity, the answer is yes. But that would indeed be to endorse extortion (which, I think, is clearly not what Anthony intended). On the other hand, he had put in a lot of hard work, so why not just reward him for it? Here the problem is that the same argument can be made for any of a host of volunteers. Volunteering is volunteering, not paid employment.

The best I can come up with is that, given that the campaign, in the person of Chris Hughes, had suggested a one time payment, a counter offer was in order. Whether an offer in the ballpark I calculated above would have kicked up the same fuss is of course another question.

Peter Woodruff
Supporting Obama '08

You're all right

cfinnie — Fri, 04 May 2007 13:28:25 -0400

I had a spirited discussion about this last night with a friend in DC who got me in to the Dean campaign as a volunteer (which she was too until later being hired by the campaign), and is now consulting on a volunteer basis with the Obama campaign. Our conversation covered many of the same points I read here.

She says, and I agree, that none of the Dean volunteers expected to be compensated for all the time and money we gave to the campaign. However, as Zephyr points out (and my friend is a good example), the Dean campaign often brought these "centers of gravity" into the campaign. My friend claims the Obama campaign tried to hire Anthony, but he didn't want to relocate to Chicago. That seems to contradict what he himself has posted and told Micah. She claims, as a paralegal, he showed enthusiasm, but no particular expertise putting up a page "any 12 year old could have done." And that letting him work remotely would have been dangerous because of his inexperience. I pointed out to her that several campaigns have used my services remotely, and she correctly replied that I have 20 years of experience in marketing, even though I'm somewhat of a political tyro. She also correctly notes that social networking sites have consistently considered using a famous person's name as cybersquatting--though many people used variations of Dean's name in 2004 for volunteer activities, and nobody objected that I ever heard of. She also contends that Anthony's page never would have garnered so many friends without Obama's name recognition, also probably true.

To sum up: I volunteer for campaigns. I also do ask to be hired at a certain point. I made that exact offer to a congressional candidate at the California convention last weekend. I was clear about when that transition would be because I am a professional in my field and I've done this before. Joe Anthony is not. My guess is that he did not do this for money. The campaign functionaries who responded to his request for help assumed he did because they do. They "negotiated" with him in as clumsy and overbearing a manner as George Bush does. It seems a counter-offer would have been order. Finding him an assistant, offering him a stipend for part-time remote work within certain bounds, offering him a lower amount to buy him out occur to me off the top of my head. I also agree with the guy who cites the multiplier effect of bad news. It's a well-known fact in marketing. The Obama campaign could have avoided it quite easily. The fact that the senator called Anthony only proves he's smarter than his campaign staff--no great surprise to me after working with several political staffs.

Terms of Service

Minger — Fri, 04 May 2007 03:53:21 -0400

I agree with bregenspan on many points.

Barack Obama is a high profile case, but I'm sure there have been plenty of quiet URL seizures when their most famous nameholders came to claim them. Odds are U2 wasn't the first to have myspace.com/u2 and that U2 didn't have to pay anybody to take it.

With Obama's high public profile among the young and idealistic, any reasonable MySpace profile would have garnered by itself 160,000 friends. A real feat is to build 160,000 friends for a noname like Barracks Obverse.

Even if you hired a high priced consultant or PR firm to maintain the profile, they in turn would apply an intern or a low wage techie to the task. Of course, you could also spend half a million dollars to give the profile a Madison Ave shine. Or you could find another passionate, able volunteer.

Valuation of the profile can be as wide as imagination but the exercise is pointless unless one takes into account the value of the URL, which by ToS ultimately reverts to Obama (per MySpace.com's unspoken but reasonable policy), and contractual obligation. With the former and none of the later, the negotiation was really a courtesy.

In episode 1x19 of Heroes, Linderman nicely asks Jessica to borrow her son Micah. To her refusal, Linderman says something like "I asked nicely as a courtesy." Jessica is a loving mom so we can't blame her for rejecting Linderman's diplomacy. Perhaps in the same way Joe Anthony feels attached to his creation and defensive or possessive when the threat of separation looms. After all, he saw the possibilities before anyone else and nurtured the profile for months. Surrogate mothers not infrequently try to keep the baby.

Whatever Joe's attachment, the legal value is whatever the Obama campaign chose to place on Joe Anthony's work.

However, given the Goliath and his volunteer David theme and their relative stakes, the burden was certainly on the Obama campaign to smooth things out. $49K to avoid bad PR and acknowledge Joe Anthony's prescience and good stewardship of the profile is merely the cost of a John Edward's spa retreat.

If Gonzalez can survive by the excuse of delegation and ignorance of fine operational details, surely will too Obama and his campaign.

http://minger.net
http://myspace.com/minger

John Anthony is an expert.

bregenspan — Fri, 04 May 2007 00:52:52 -0400

John Anthony is an expert. Whether you personally value your work that is a whole different story; but he is not just an expert, he is an influential.

He may be an expert, but when he did this work he was acting as a volunteer, and he was also using a platform operated according to clear terms of service that could allow Myspace to make changes to his account or the myspace.com/barackobama URL at any time. The Obama campaign clearly could have handled things better, but it seems very problematic for someone to do volunteer work and then retroactively demand "expert" pay.

as a myspace friend

deflorist — Fri, 04 May 2007 00:25:33 -0400

Personally, I never knew of this tech president site until Chris Matthews began spewing stats back in March. His mentioning of Obama's gain in popularity on myspace and youtube sites effected my attentions. I had been a myspace friend on Joe Anthony's space for a few months, joining it because, upon searching for Obama networkers, it had the largest number of friends, thereby suggesting it was the MOST official Obama site on myspace. Somehow I felt that we as a myspace group were indeed making a difference. Joe Anthony's page did make a large difference. Granted, many friends there were younger than 18, some were not even American, some were Clinton supporters, and we learned there are Obama groups in European countries, in Canada, and God knows where else. A large community was thriving, and communicating in real time, and on a more personal level than Obama.com has been offering. And yes I read all the bulletins, and watched all the videos, copying them to my site, and sharing them with young people I hoped to get involved. (I am 51)

The Obama camp somehow discounted the impact of this group to the degree they remained content on letting the internet popularity statistics be dictated by this "un-official" site. Did they just all of a sudden realise they might want to make it official? A better move would have been to launch an official site upon announcing his candidacy, thereby easing the myspace shift of friends in a friendly way. This could have effectively reduced Joe Anthony's workload also, which is truly underestimated by some bloggers here.

The 18-25 year group has a wonderful potential in this election. The un-registered percentage of this group is massive. I'm sorry to see some of the great friends I have met through Joe's site wondering if they should abandon ship. Keeping the site as official, compensating Mr. Anthony from this point on, would have maintained the positive influences we are all working for on behalf of Sen. Obama.

I'm sure none of us know exactly the course of conversation between Obama campaign HQ and Mr. Anthony. How was the question of compensation approached? Was the correct response, "I'll do whatever you want for nothing?" It seems they were asking for him to say what it was worth...just to use it against him as an inappropriate response. However the communications proceeded, I feel Mr. Obama and his growing organization need to clarify this in order to restore hopefull fencers. Lets all work together, you know, turn the page.

Sincerely, Patty DeForrest

Full access to data, not control of people

Luigi Montanez — Thu, 03 May 2007 17:38:35 -0400

I think my use of the term "control" made people think of totalitarian regimes looking over everyone's shoulders. I really meant that a campaign needs to be able to fully access data about their supporters, so that they can message those people and run analytics to see what is and isn't working.

Michael: To clarify, in the DFA example I'm strictly speaking about the control of and full access to field data, not of people. I'm not at all talking about the legal relationship between volunteers and either iteration of DFA. All local DFA groups remain as separate entities, and they can and generally do whatever they want, as Zephyr describes.

The difference between now and then is the platform volunteers use to organize is now operated by DFA (via DFA-Link), when in the Meetup.com days, signup sheets and organizer reports were the only way for the campaign to know who RSVPed and attended the monthly meetings. Meetup.com, as a separate company, justifiably did not share user data with the campaign. With DFA-Link, DFA can see exactly what DFA members are up to, and run analytics on that data. But DFA volunteers at the local level still autonomously run their groups.

I'm not sure of this because I'm not involved in local Obama groups, but I would assume that My.BarackObama.com is being used the same way in most parts of the country: the campaign provides the tools, and the volunteers can use those tools to organize themselves.

Zephyr's Comments and yours

Michael Turk — Thu, 03 May 2007 15:48:22 -0400

Luigi, you might want to take a look at Zephyr's explanation of the Dean campaign in this context and try to square it with your own.

She seems to disagree with you on the fundamental points.

Name-calling is not necessary, nor is the slippery slope

Luigi Montanez — Thu, 03 May 2007 14:17:49 -0400

It's my opinion that a campaign/political organization needs to control its own data, and can't rely on external sources because they're not reliable enough when it matters.

It's about execution. A campaign needs to know who exactly is self-selecting themselves to be supporters for their candidate, and they need to be able to contact those people to get them further plugged into the campaign. That wasn't possible with the MySpace situation when Anthony was controlling the URL.

In the video I link to, I outlined the experience that Dean for America and then Democracy for America had with Meetup.com, and why a split (in that case amicable) was necessary. I see the same underlying dynamics at play here.

Yes, actually, he is

Fred Gooltz — Thu, 03 May 2007 14:05:13 -0400

http://my.barackobama.com/page/sendtofriend
It sucks the emails right out of your computer... if you click 'yes'.

Oh, so the campaign needs to control MY DATA as well?

Liza Sabater — Thu, 03 May 2007 13:14:37 -0400

are you mad?

seriously, the campaign doesn't have to control anything. that's the point in this new web 2.0 world. that's supposedly the point of a big tent, of the power of technology in participatory democracy and Obama's allegedly new politics.

this is why his word, his whole campaign ends up being a sham.

if Obama hires people for whom a MySpace page is only emails and everything they do is politics as usual then he doesn't deserve the nomination let alone the Presidency. if these are the people he is going to end up using as advisors in the white house, i honestly don't want them.

and i'll make sure i blast that message across my very vetted mailing lists of influentials.

is the Obama campaign going to come after my mailing lists?

Liza Sabater, Publisher
www.culturekitchen.com
www.dailygotham.com

I agree that the Obama campaign handled it poorly

Luigi Montanez — Thu, 03 May 2007 13:05:07 -0400

Lisa, yes, the negative press that the Obama people have gotten from this is substantial, and it has/will hurt them. I agree with you completely. I don't agree however that "he's an influencer of over 100,000 people". Like I said, mass communication methods in MySpace are abysmal. You don't have an email address, you can't guarantee that eyeballs will be directed to your message. At best, his bulletin messages get open rates of 1%, which would mean he's an influencer of 1,600 people at a time, or several thousand throughout the course of a "bulletin campaign".

But I think our divergence comes from our different backgrounds. You're looking at this mess from the view of PR -- that the negative word-of-mouth Anthony is able to generate makes the actions of the Obama campaign wrong. I'm looking at it from an online organizing viewpoint. As I see it, the campaign was completely justified in trying to take over the profile, because in the end, a campaign needs to control its data.

That was actually a central point of a talk I did at RootscampDC last December. Both Joe Rospars and Aldon Hynes (commenter above) were in the room when I gave this presentation:

DFA-Link as a Niche Social Network

Secondly, I'm not "dissing" Joe (not John) Anthony for his work. I'm sure he worked very hard at it and did it with the best intentions. I just don't think his work was worth $39,000. Also I think that if you start as a volunteer, you shouldn't expect to be paid in the end, no matter what you do for the campaign.

Couple of facts

DWCG — Thu, 03 May 2007 13:04:23 -0400

People are missing the forest for the trees here.

No where in FEC law does it allow any person or entity (aside from perhaps political party) to hand over a list of 160K potential or actual supporters to a campaign for free. Fair market value must be paid.

What exactly fair market value is for access to Anthony's friends is debatable, as the article highlights, but it's clearly as much or more than he requested.

Even if he was hired by the Obama campaign, and I really don't see why he wasn't, they would have had to compensate him to begin using the group.

FEC law is the primary reason Anthony still has access to the MySpace friends, despite not having the domain name. If they took his supporters then they'd be forced to compensate him.

You need to get one thing straight

Liza Sabater — Thu, 03 May 2007 12:39:16 -0400

John Anthony is an expert. Whether you personally value your work that is a whole different story; but he is not just an expert, he is an influential.

You, "Luigi Montanez", can't just parachute in to what Anthony created and have the same kind of influence and authority he has. To you, it's emails.

To us who have assessed a value on his work, he has built online relationships and a reputation for which you can't put a dollar sign on. So you pay him for the work which is still quite monumental.

I have been an early adopter of online technologies for over 10 years now. I know what it is to be there first and pave the way for others. I can tell you that John's work is not only invaluable but marketable. When I wrote on an earlier post that campaign managers ought to hire anthropologists and semioticians in order to deconstruct their social networking constituencies, I was not being academic. I was pointing to a fact that, in order to understand these new social spaces, you need to have those skill.

But let me state the obvious : Reputations are made with actions not with intentions. Weeding out spammers is a way of building a reputation. Answering emails, leaving comments on other people's profiles, updating the events calendar --every single action is a tangible, a measurable and factual result of online reputation building. Yeah sure, you can even buy software to spam other people's profiles with comments and leave a trail of contacts but sooner or later people are going to catch wind of the fact that you're spamming and not really communicating with them.

Anthony was not just a guy pushing the admit button on a profile page. He was a communicator. And he is now an influencer with over 100K people who may weigh in his experience with the Obama campaing and turn it into a word-of-mouth nightmare.

Because, let me be clear, if in retail 1 bad word-of-mouth equals 10 people, in business and online is quite different. Over at Colgate-Palmolive where I worked, each negative phone call was factored by 100. So one angry consumer would count at 100 potentially lost families, not people, but families using their brands.

With the internet, memes can spread like wild fire overnight but, contrary to offline fads, memes are not ephemeral. They can live for ever. If not in the originating page, memes live on in countless comments, quoted blog posts or even scrapped pages.

I would factor the impact of a negative post ANYWHERE by 1000 bad word of mouth impressions. Why? You have Google and the search engines to thank.

160,000 x 1000 ... let's say that just a third of the people agree with Anthony, that's still 53,333,333 potential bad impressions.

Let's say you don't agree with my factoring it by 1000. Let's just say that we should factor it only by 100, just like Colgate-Palmolive does. Well, guess what, it's still over 5.3 million bad impressions.

160,000/4*100= 4,000,000

160,000/10*100= 1,600,000

Do you think his work is not valuable or that his reputation as a leader is worthless?

Think again long and hard. You diss him, you are dissing the very people who have made MySpace famous and valuable. It's not because of Ruperto Murdoch and Barack Obama that people go to MySpace. They go there because people like John Anthony make it worth it for them to be there.

It's about respect

ehofteig — Thu, 03 May 2007 12:22:39 -0400

Back in the '04 cycle, I managed all of John Kerry's online profiles. Friendster, MySpace, Orkut etc.

The basic reality in 'campaigning' in social networking spaces is that it's really not about 'campaigning.' This is not a space that's as much about convincing people or motiviating action - although that can be done - as it is about building a relationship with people that want to get to know you. It's about respect.

Personally, I think that's why the latest mis-management by a campaign in this space has been so heated. This isn't a top-down tightly controlled messaging space, it's a place to connect and get to know people. Think of this space as an ongoing meet-and-greet. People mill around, chat, get to know eachother and eventually make plans to take further action. Now add an advance guy who comes in, throws the host who's home your in into a closet and says, "no - you're doing it all wrong and you need to talk about X and direct people to Y." The people at the party are going to leave. They'll be offended and feel a lack of respect.

So my basic point is, when managing a 'mega-group' treat your candidate's 'friends' exactly how you would treat your personal friends in your own space; with respect.

Erin Hofteig

Experts?

Luigi Montanez — Thu, 03 May 2007 11:55:02 -0400

Micah, those 18,000 comments on his profile are from all time, dating back to 2004. Most were generated from when the profile lived at myspace.com/barackobama.

Almost all those experts quoted show an obvious and glaring ignorance to how MySpace actually works. They can't compare it to Care2 email addresses or PR efforts because it's a completely different animal.

160,000 MySpace friends are not 160,000 "names" as we think of it in politics. There's absolutely no good way to contact all those people. The best method is sending out a MySpace "bulletin" that will have an extremely low open rate (1% or less optimistically, but I would bet on 0.5% or even lower). Further, those names weren't acquired in any professional sense. I believe Anthony when he says that he spent hours a day responding to messages and friend requests, but those were all generated because of the simple fact that the profile looked like it was Barack Obama's, not any unique effort undertaken by Anthony. This is still evidenced by reading the messages on Anthony's current page, where people still think that they're talking to the Obama campaign.

Only Stutzman and Rosenblatt get MySpace, so kudos to them.

If the campaign controlled the page from the start, they'd have many more friends right now, and many more would have gotten plugged into where it matters, My.BarackObama.com.