There's an interesting drama unfolding this morning on the blogosphere, revolving around the nasty interaction between the Barack Obama campaign and volunteer Joe Anthony, who built the 160,000-friend strong Barack Obama Myspace page. It looks like Obama really screwed up here, being unwilling to pay Anthony a fairly minor bit of cash in exchange for control of the strongest existing Myspace campaign community.
TechPresident has much, much more.*
MyDD has a very interesting take:
Yea, $49K to deliver 160,000 supporters; that's .32 cents each for opted in and engaged activsts. A bargain. [The amount was actually up to $44K] $50,000 is what it takes to advertise on the Liberal Ad Network for two weeks. It's a minor expenditure in the grand scheme of things.
Moreover, asks Micah Sifry on techPresident:
If it weren't for the hundreds of hours put into sites like MySpace by passionate volunteers like Joe Anthony, would the folks at MySpace even have anything like an Impact Channel? The only reason campaigns and advertisers are taking sites like MySpace seriously is because they have millions of users; shouldn't the volunteers who help draw the crowds to these new online town halls get some kind of compensation beyond a little modest recognition from political professionals now and then?
There's a fascinating question here. MySpace gets the ads, the music deals, the TV deals, and all the income associated with that. But all MySpace is doing is serving as a software provider and host. There is a second half to the value of MySpace, and that's the community formed there by volunteer users.
Is there a possibility here, for MySpace and other social networking users to band together and form a union which demands just compensation for their work? Possibly. The tools for organizing such a union exist right there on the site. All an organizer would have to do is start up a "MySpace Workers" page, put together a well-sized community, and organize a strike, or a similar job action. And find a union which would have their bargaining unit. That's all, nothing to it! If you can't catch the snark, let me state it clearly: starting a union for social networking "workers" is hard work, and it's the kind of thing which an enterprising union should really look into. SEIU seems the most likely organization for this kind of innovative approach, but CWA might be a good candidate also. Of course, an enterprising liberal entrepreneur could also try to organize such a union.
Here's another intriguing approach, for liberal entrepreneurs. Why not create a social network where compensation is built into the model from the start? The network will give users some amount of money for each friend they add, or for each blog post they write, or each group they start which has a large number of friends, etc. Compensation can be based on the ad revenues projected to be raised by that kind of activity, of course. Could this kind of network - with sufficient features and a friendly user interface - compete and even beat MySpace or Facebook? Perhaps. (Incidentally, for the techies amongst us, it's possible to bootstrap such a site using the
Facebook API, though I haven't really picked apart that set of tools.) If such a site was started, I'd love to see some kind of bargaining unit built into the site from the start. It would be a fascinating experiment in Internet-age unionism.
Any takers?
* Full disclosure: I am an independent contractor for TechPresident.
Update: Here is another way of looking at this whole episode. Form a social networking consulting firm, and offer a package to campaigns - $50,000 in exchange for an active, engaged, 200,000-person strong social networking page. See how many bite. The package can always be adjusted down for smaller campaigns; for example, $10,000 for a 40,000-person page for a statewide candidate. The firm can also perform ROI analysis to determine how much "bang for the buck" the campaign is getting, in terms of ActBlue donations or volunteers generated from such pages. I bet the return would be pretty good.
